What is a 'thunk'?

Question

I\'ve seen it used in programming (specifically in the C++ domain) and have no idea what it is. Presumably it is a design pattern, but I could be wrong. Can anyone give a go

Answer 1

There's considerable variation in use. Almost universally, a thunk is a function that's (at least conceptually) unusually small and simple. It's usually some sort of adapter that gives you the correct interface to something or other (some data, another function, etc.) but is at least seen as doing little else.

It's almost like a form of syntactic sugar, except that (at least as usually used) syntactic sugar is supposed to make things look the way the human reader wants to see them, and a thunk is to make something look the way the compiler wants to see it.