Ian Lance Taylor wrote: > Mark Mitchell writes "I'd certainly check with the FSF > > before betting on that. " > True, though Apple's entry in the copyright file says "assigns past and > future changes" (I checked before the above e-mail). Certainly checking > with the FSF is a good idea. --- Conceptually, it's not 'rocket science' It's just providing some allocated memory to a procedure that it uses as it's memory, (versus memory on stack that goes away when function returns) whenever it is called and for as long as the function stays "active" (hasn't explicitly released it's allocated memory). Perl has had similar things and nearly an entire book(Higher Order Perl, M.J. Dominus) was written about their use (it's a really good book, in my opinion -- it's not really perl specific (though everything is in perl), but I found it provided me with a fairly good understanding of closures as used with named or anonymous functions. I believe the mention it's taken from lisp's lambda operator that did much the same.
-l