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From: sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.functional
Subject: Re: thunk's
Message-ID: <9779@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 23 Apr 91 09:07:07 GMT
References: <1991Apr19.064216.23597@gucis.sct.gu.edu.au> <1151@creatures.cs.vt.edu>
Organization: Edinburgh University
Lines: 15

lavinus@csgrad.cs.vt.edu writes:

>I have a question that has been nagging me for quite some time: why do we
>call closures "thunk"s?  I mean, where did that word come from?  The only

Did this not come from work on implementing call by name in Algol 60,
where the stack pointer was imagined to go `thunk!' as it jumped from
one environment to another. 

Sean

-- 
Sean Matthews                        80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, UK 
Dept. of Artificial Intelligence     +44 (0) 31 650 2722
University of Edinburgh              sean@castle.ed.ac.uk