Closing over context still not easy in mainstream languages, Film at 11
I find it fascinating that after so many decades of support for closures, we’re still stuck in a C-style mentality of passing function-pointers that take an explicit context argument rather than a proper closure object. Witness the design of .NET’s Type.FindInterfaces method:
public virtual Type[] FindInterfaces (TypeFilter filter,
Object filterCriteria);
The TypeFilter argument is a delegate. The Object argument is context that the delegate may require! This is pretty much exactly the old-school C-style way of implementing closures:
/* Yes, pretty crude translation, I know */
TypeArray find_interfaces(int (*type_filter)(Type*, void*),
void *argument);
Smalltalk (and Lisps) would do it in the natural way, with a block (a closure):
someType selectInterfaces: [:interface | ... ]
Lisp 1.5, complete with support for lexical closures, appeared in 1959. It’s 2007. That’s forty-eight years.
4 comments September 11th, 2007 tonyg