Closures (Was: Ant and Make)

[Tracy Reed]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 01:34:32AM +0000, SJS spake thusly:
> To be fair, closures are probably nice when used sparingly, okay when
> used in moderation, and annoying when used to excess.

I have never used closures and don't quite grok them although I have a
general idea. I am looking forward to figuring out how to play with
them myself. One area where I have heard of closures being quite
useful is in tracking the state of wep apps. Each user gets his own
closure in which the web app manipulates his state.

> Mmmm... no, you need loops for turing completeness.

Depends on what we mean by loop. I suspect he meant ALGOL-like
for/while loops. It is a loop if we just happen to use a goto/jmp to
the same address a number of times in a row? Is tail recursion a loop?

> > Actually, the Clojure docs don't.  They call them bindings.
> 
> Ah. Good name.

Indeed. It is often helpful to newbies to change away from the
baggage-laden nomenclature of their previous languages to help them
understand the new concepts like "variables" that do not vary.

-- 
Tracy Reed
http://tracyreed.org
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