n. Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be 'checklist features', but this jargon sense of the phrase has not been reported.
2. In simulations, the discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount of time is often left unspecified, since the only constraint of interest is the ordering of events. This sort of AI simulation is often pejoratively referred to as 'tick-tick-tick' simulation, especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long, independent chains of causes is handwaved.
n. 1. "A piece of coding which provides an address", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler generates a thunk to compute the expression and leave the address of the result in some standard location.
n. 1. Yet another meta-syntactic variable (see foo). It is reported that at CMU from the mid-1970s the canonical series of these was foo, bar, thud, blat.
2. Rare term for the hash character, '#' (ASCII 0100011).
vi. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation) and are therefore said to thrash. Someone who keeps changing his mind (esp. about what to work on next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying to execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on any single task) may also be described as thrashing.