Sunday, June 21, 2009

I thunk, therefore I am

Every once in a while I'm humbled to find that there's a word, in computer science, for something fairly common, that I've never heard of before. Today's word? Thunk.

According to Wikipedia, "thunk" may refer to:
  • a piece of code to perform a delayed computation (similar to a closure)
  • a feature of some virtual function table implementations (similar to a wrapper function)
  • a mapping of machine data from one system-specific form to another, usually for compatibility reasons
The original paper on thunks was P.Z. Ingerman's somewhat inscrutable (to me, at least) piece in Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1961).

I am, as I say, humbled to find that I did not know the term thunk. All this time, I thought it was the past tense of think.
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5 comments:

  1. Jon Marks4:29 PM

    I knew what Thunking was. In fact, many moons ago, I had to write an ODBC driver for some OLAP database. Part of this involved playing with the dreaded "Thunking DLL". These converted 16-bit ODBC calls to 32-bit ODBC calls. I guess that's your third definition. Google "ODBC Thunking" for a view of a bygone hell.

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