A side note... in the late '80s, Bell Labs had a project to design an
set of extensions to C for tasking intrinsics.  The resulting language
was called "Concurrent C".

The term they used in Concurrent C for a task was: "task".

The tasking model in Concurrent C was quite like that of Ada.  The
language was designed by Narain Gehani, who is very Ada-literate and has
written a number of textbooks on concurrent programming (including a
recent Java-oriented one).

Concurrent C had an Ada-like synchronous rendezvous concept.  They
enlarged upon this by adding an asynchronous variant.

Bell subsequently merged the Concurrent C stuff with C++ to
create "Concurrent C++", but unlike C++, Concurrent C never achieved
critical mass.  If it had, then maybe "task" would have
become the commonly-known term instead of "thread"!

--

Mark Lundquist
Senior Software Engineer
Rational Software
Development Solutions Business Unit
UNIX Suites Group
Aloha, OR, USA