The Importance of Terminology's Quality

[Steve Schafer]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:21:50 +0100, Martin Gregorie
<martin at see_sig_for_address.invalid> wrote:

>The first time I ran across the term "thunking" was when Windows 3
>introduced the Win32S shim and hence the need to switch addressing between
>16 bit and 32 bit modes across call interfaces. That was called "thunking"
>by Microsoft and even they would surely admit it was a kludge.

Win32s thunks are a completely different beast from the original Algol
60 thunks. As far as I know, the first published description of thunks
was:

 Ingerman PZ (1961) Thunks: A way of compiling procedure statements with
 some comments on procedure declarations, CACM 4:55-58.

Steve Schafer
Fenestra Technologies Corp.
http://www.fenestra.com/