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Date:Mon Jan 28 22:34:28 1998 
Subject:Re: Complexity 
From:Robert A Duff 
Volume-ID:980128.01 

In article <34ce2518.0@rcfnews.cs.umass.edu>,
Robin Popplestone  <pop@cs.umass.edu> wrote:
>From  the  implementor's  point  of  view,  you  don't  just  stumble  into
>call-by-name, because you've got to work at it. Indeed the nomenclature  of
>the early Algol implementors, who talked  of "thunks" has survived to  this
>day in the functional language  community for lazy evaluation. Nobody  else
>talks of "thunks" or thinks about them either. ...

Not sure what "else" refers to in "Nobody else...".  If you mean,
"Nobody else than the functional language community", then that's not
quite true.  At least some compiler writers (for non-functional
languages like Ada, for example) use the term "thunk" to refer to any
compiler-generated procedure that doesn't directly correspond to a
source-code-level procedure.  This doesn't exactly match the Algol term,
which was really a *pair* of compiler-generated procedures.

- Bob
-- 
Change robert to bob to get my real email address.  Sorry.