Question

I was reading Object Oriented Javascript and found the concept of closures. I didn’t quite understand why and when it is used. Do other languages like Java also have closures? I basically want to understand how knowing the concept of closures can help me improve my coding.

Answer 1

A closure is a first class function with bound variables.

Roughly that means that:

• You can pass the closure as a parameter to other functions
• The closure stores the value of some variables from the lexical scope that existed at the time that is was created

Java initially didn’t have syntactic support for closures (these were introduced in Java 8), although it was fairly common practice to simulate them using anonymous inner classes. Here’s an example:

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Comparator;

public class StupidComparator { 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // this is a value used (bound) by the inner class
        // note that it needs to be "final"
        final int numberToCompareTo=10;

        // this is an inner class that acts like a closure and uses one bound value
        Comparator<Integer> comp=new Comparator<Integer>() {
            public int compare(Integer a, Integer b) {
                int result=0;
                if (a<numberToCompareTo) result=result-1;
                if (b<numberToCompareTo) result=result+1;
                return result;
            }
        };

        Integer[] array=new Integer[] {1,10, 5 , 15, 6 , 20, 21, 3, 7};

        // this is a function call that takes the inner class "closure" as a parameter
        Arrays.sort(array,comp);

        for (int i:array) System.out.println(i);
    }
}