thunk
/θʌŋk/ interjection, verb, noun
Also a form of think
Forms thunks thunking thunked
- interjection Representing the dull sound of the impact of a heavy object striking another and coming to an immediate standstill, with neither object being broken by the impact.
- verb To strike against something, without breakage, making a "thunk" sound. “I was thunked on the head by his stick.”
- noun (computing, functional programming) A delayed computation.
- noun (computing) In the Scheme programming language, a function or procedure taking no arguments.
- noun (computing) A specialized subroutine that one software module uses to execute code in another module.
- verb (computing, functional programming, transitive) To delay (a computation).
- verb (computing, transitive) To execute (code) by means of a thunk.
Etymology
Onomatopoeic.
Said by the inventors to be from the irregular jocular past tense of think (see Etymology 1), being coined when they realised that the type of an argument in ALGOL 60 could be predetermined at compile time (with a little compile-time “thought”).
By analogy with past participles ending in "-unk", such as drunk and sunk.
Sources: Wiktionary — from the Wiktionary entry “thunk”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details