12.12 Notes and Further Reading

Fortran was the first programming language to use pass-by-reference. Pass-bysharing was first described by Barbara Liskov and others in 1974 in the reference manual for the CLU programming language. The pass-by-need parameter-passing mechanism is an example of a more general technique called memoization, which is also used in dynamic programming. Thunks are used at compile time in the assembly code generated by compilers. Assemblers also manipulate thunks. Jensen’s device is an application of thunks (i.e., pass-by-name parameters), named for the Danish computer scientist Jørn Jensen, who devised it.