Closures

All user-defined functions are closures. Closures “close over” the environment they were defined in.

For top level defined functions this broadly translates as being that the function remembers the module it was defined in and therefore has access to any internally defined functions and variables in that module that would otherwise be inaccessible.

If a function is defined inside a block it also has access to any block-local variables which gives rise to the idea of private variables.

Remember that functions are first class values and can be returned from blocks, functions or, as here, variables in an outer scope can be bound to those values.

simple-closures.idio

;; Declare a couple of top level names which we'll assign the functions
;; to inside the block.
;;
;; By convention, functions that modify things have an exclamation
;; mark at the end of their names.
incr-thing := #f
set-thing! := #f

{
  ;; n is local to the block and invisible outside the block
  n := 0

  ;; re-bind the top level name "set-thing!" to this anonymous
  ;; function inside the block where n is visible
  set-thing! = function (v) {
    n = v
  }

  ;; ditto for "incr-thing" which doesn't take any arguments
  incr-thing = function () {
    ;; here we'll look to return the current value and increment it
    ;; after
    t := n
    n = n + 1
    t
  }
}

;; out here, n is no longer accessible except through the two
;; functions
printf "value is %d\n" (incr-thing)
printf "value is %d\n" (incr-thing)
printf "value is %d\n" (incr-thing)
set-thing! 37
printf "value is %d\n" (incr-thing)
printf "value is %d\n" (incr-thing)

$ idio simple-closures
value is 0
value is 1
value is 2
value is 37
value is 38

Last built at 2024-05-21T06:11:38Z+0000 from 77077af (dev) for Idio 0.3