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. (R&R don't talk of thunks -
: did this come from the Kidsgrove compiler or where?)
I seem to remember the term being coined in a CACM paper on Algol 60
implementation by Ingerman in the early '60s. Aha, I've even found
the reference: "Thunks", P.Z.Ingerman, CACM 4 (Jan 61) pp 55-58.
My copy of R&R is dated 1964, so not mentioning thunks is perhaps
surprising.
And of course, as with so many other things, Microsoft have pinched
the term to refer to something else...
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John English | mailto:je@brighton.ac.uk
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