What is the exact definition of a closure?

Question

I've read through previous topics on closures on stackflow and other sources and one thing is still confusing me. From what I've been able to piece together technically a closure is simply the set of data containing the code of a function and the value of bound variables in that function.

In other words technically the following C function should be a closure from my understanding:

int count()
{
    static int x = 0;

    return x++;
}

Yet everything I read seems to imply closures must somehow involve passing functions as first class objects. In addition it usually seems to be implied that closures are not part of procedural programming. Is this a case of a solution being overly associated with the problem it solves or am I misunderstanding the exact definition?

Answer 1

From what I understand a closure also has to have access to the variables in the calling context. Closures are usually associated with functional programming. Languages can have elements from different types of programming perspectives, functional, procedural, imperative, declarative, etc. They get their name from being closed over a specified context. They may also have lexical binding in that they can reference the specified context with the same names that are used in that context. Your example has no reference to any other context but a global static one.

From Wikipedia

A closure closes over the free variables (variables which are not local variables)

Answer 2

No, that's not a closure. Your example is simply a function that returns the result of incrementing a static variable.

Here's how a closure would work:

function makeCounter( int x )
{
  return int counter() {
    return x++;
  }
}

c = makeCounter( 3 );
printf( "%d" c() ); => 4
printf( "%d" c() ); => 5
d = makeCounter( 0 );
printf( "%d" d() ); => 1
printf( "%d" c() ); => 6

In other words, different invocations of makeCounter() produce different functions with their own binding of variables in their lexical environment that they have "closed over".

Edit: I think examples like this make closures easier to understand than definitions, but if you want a definition I'd say, "A closure is a combination of a function and an environment. The environment contains the variables that are defined in the function as well as those that are visible to the function when it was created. These variables must remain available to the function as long as the function exists."

Answer 3

For the exact definition, I suggest looking at its Wikipedia entry. It's especially good. I just want to clarify it with an example.

Assume this C# code snippet (that's supposed to perform an AND search in a list):

List<string> list = new List<string> { "hello world", "goodbye world" };
IEnumerable<string> filteredList = list;
var keywords = new [] { "hello", "world" };
foreach (var keyword in keywords)
    filteredList = filteredList.Where(item => item.Contains(keyword));

foreach (var s in filteredList)  // closure is called here
    Console.WriteLine(s);

It's a common pitfall in C# to do something like that. If you look at the lambda expression inside Where, you'll see that it defines a function that it's behavior depends on the value of a variable at its definition site. It's like passing a variable itself to the function, rather than the value of that variable. Effectively, when this closure is called, it retrieves the value of keyword variable at that time. The result of this sample is very interesting. It prints out both "hello world" and "goodbye world", which is not what we wanted. What happened? As I said above, the function we declared with the lambda expression is a closure over keyword variable so this is what happens:

filteredList = filteredList.Where(item => item.Contains(keyword))
                           .Where(item => item.Contains(keyword));

and at the time of closure execution, keyword has the value "world," so we're basically filtering the list a couple times with the same keyword. The solution is:

foreach (var keyword in keywords) {
    var temporaryVariable = keyword;
    filteredList = filteredList.Where(item => item.Contains(temporaryVariable));
}

Since temporaryVariable is scoped to the body of the foreach loop, in every iteration, it is a different variable. In effect, each closure will bind to a distinct variable (those are different instances of temporaryVariable at each iteration). This time, it'll give the correct results ("hello world"):

filteredList = filteredList.Where(item => item.Contains(temporaryVariable_1))
                           .Where(item => item.Contains(temporaryVariable_2));

in which temporaryVariable_1 has the value of "hello" and temporaryVariable_2 has the value "world" at the time of closure execution.

Note that the closures have caused an extension to the lifetime of variables (their life were supposed to end after each iteration of the loop). This is also an important side effect of closures.

Answer 4

Great question! Given that one of the OOP principles of OOP is that objects has behavior as well as data, closures are a special type of object because their most important purpose is their behavior. That said, what do I mean when I talk about their "behavior?"

(A lot of this is drawn from "Groovy in Action" by Dierk Konig, which is an awesome book)

On the simplest level a close is really just some code that's wrapped up to become an androgynous object/method. It's a method because it can take params and return a value, but it's also an object in that you can pass around a reference to it.

In the words of Dierk, imagine an envelope that has a piece of paper inside. A typical object would have variables and their values written on this paper, but a closure would have a list of instructions instead. Let's say the letter says to "Give this envelope and letter to your friends."

In Groovy: Closure envelope = { person -> new Letter(person).send() }
addressBookOfFriends.each (envelope)

The closure object here is the value of the envelope variable and it's use is that it's a param to the each method.

Some details: Scope: The scope of a closure is the data and members that can be accessed within it. Returning from a closure: Closures often use a callback mechanism to execute and return from itself. Arguments: If the closure needs to take only 1 param, Groovy and other langs provide a default name: "it", to make coding quicker. So for example in our previous example:

addressBookOfFriends.each (envelope) 
is the same as:
addressBookOfFriends.each { new Letter(it).send() }

Hope this is what you're looking for!

Answer 5

I think Peter Eddy has it right, but the example could be made more interesting. You could define two functions which close over a local variable, increment & decrement. The counter would be shared between that pair of functions, and unique to them. If you define a new pair of increment/decrement functions, they would be sharing a different counter.

Also, you don't need to pass in that initial value of x, you could let it default to zero inside the function block. That would make it clearer that it's using a value which you no longer have normal access to otherwise.

Answer 6

A closure is an implementation technique for representing procedures/functions with local state. One way to implement closures is described in SICP. I will present the gist of it, anyway.

All expressions, including functions are evaluated in an environement, An environment is a sequence of frames. A frame maps variable names to values. Each frame also has a pointer to it's enclosing environment. A function is evaluated in a new environment with a frame containing bindings for it's arguments. Now let us look at the following interesting scenario. Imagine that we have a function called accumulator, which when evaluated, will return another function:

// This is some C like language that has first class functions and closures.
function accumulator(counter) {
    return (function() { return ++counter; });
}

What will happen when we evaluate the following line?

accum1 = accumulator(0);

First a new environment is created and an integer object (for counter) is bound to 0 in it's first frame. The returned value, which is a new function, is bound in the global environment. Usually the new environment will be garbage collected once the function evaluation is over. Here that will not happen. accum1 is holding a reference to it, as it needs access to the variable counter. When accum1 is called, it will increment the value of counter in the referenced environment. Now we can call accum1 a function with local state or a closure.

I have described a few practical uses of closures at my blog http://vijaymathew.wordpress.com. (See the posts "Dangerous designs" and "On Message-Passing").

Answer 7

There's a lot of answers already, but I'll add another one anyone...

Closures aren't unique to functional languages. They occur in Pascal (and family), for instance, which has nested procedures. Standard C doesn't have them (yet), but IIRC there is a GCC extension.

The basic issue is that a nested procedure may refer to variables defined in it's parent. Furthermore, the parent may return a reference to the nested procedure to its caller.

The nested procedure still refers to variables that were local to the parent - specifically to the values those variables had when the line making the function-reference was executed - even though those variables no longer exist as the parent has exited.

The issue even occurs if the procedure is never returned from the parent - different references to the nested procedure constructed at different times may be using different past values of the same variables.

The resolution to this is that when the nested function is referenced, it is packaged up in a "closure" containing the variable values it needs for later.

A Python lambda is a simple functional-style example...

def parent () :
  a = "hello"
  return (lamda : a)

funcref = parent ()
print funcref ()

My Pythons a bit rusty, but I think that's right. The point is that the nested function (the lambda) is still referring to the value of the local variable a even though parent has exited when it is called. The function needs somewhere to preserve that value until it's needed, and that place is called a closure.

A closure is a bit like an implicit set of parameters.