thunk

thunk¹

T0196500 (thŭngk)n. A dull, hollow sound: the thunk of a metal pipe striking a tree.intr.v. thunked, thunk·ing, thunks To make a dull, hollow sound: "Her hard shoes thunk on the stairs" (Carolyn Chute).

[Imitative.]

thunk²

T0196500 (thŭngk)v. Nonstandard A past tense and a past participle of think.

thunk

(θʌŋk) n, vbinformal another word for thud

thunk¹

(θʌŋk)

n. 1. an abrupt, dull sound. v.i. 2. to make such a sound. [1945–50; b. thud and clunk]

thunk²

(θʌŋk)

v. Nonstandard. a pt. and pp. of think ¹.

Thesaurus

Noun

thunk - a dull hollow sound; "the basketball made a thunk as it hit the rim"sound - the sudden occurrence of an audible event; "the sound awakened them"

thunk

[thəŋk] (computer science) An additional subprogram created by the compiler to represent the evaluation of the argument of an expression in the call-by-name procedure.

thunk

(programming)/thuhnk/ 1. "A piece of coding which provides anaddress", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formaldefinitions in ALGOL 60 procedure calls. If a procedureis called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a thunk which computes theexpression and leaves the address of the result in somestandard location.

2. The term was later generalised to mean an expression,frozen together with its environment (variable values), forlater evaluation if and when needed (similar to a"closure"). The process of unfreezing these thunks iscalled "forcing".

3. A stubroutine, in an overlay programming environment,that loads and jumps to the correct overlay.

Compare trampoline.

There are a couple of onomatopoeic myths circulating about theorigin of this term. The most common is that it is the soundmade by data hitting the stack; another holds that the soundis that of the data hitting an accumulator. Yet anothersuggests that it is the sound of the expression being unfrozenat argument-evaluation time. In fact, according to theinventors, it was coined after they realised (in the wee hoursafter hours of discussion) that the type of an argument inALGOL 60 could be figured out in advance with a littlecompile-time thought, simplifying the evaluation machinery.In other words, it had "already been thought of"; thus it waschristened a "thunk", which is "the past tense of "think" attwo in the morning".

4. (Microsoft Windows programming) universal thunk,generic thunk, flat thunk.

thunk

In a PC, to execute the instructions required to switch between segmented addressing of memory and flat addressing. A thunk typically occurs when a 16-bit application is running in a 32-bit address space, and its 16-bit segmented address must be converted into a full 32-bit flat address. On the other hand, if a 32-bit program calls a 16-bit DLL, then the thunk is in the opposite direction: from 32 bit to 16 bit.

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Words related to thunk

noun a dull hollow sound

Related Words

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Words related to thunk

noun a dull hollow sound

Related Words

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thunk²

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thunk²