Question

I’m now studying Emacs Lisp from the reference manual and Common Lisp from a LISP Book.

from the Common Lisp book

>> (setf power-of-two
     (let ((previous-power-of-two 1))
       #'(lambda ()
           (setf previous-power-of-two
             (* previous-power-of-two 2)))))

>> (funcall power-of-two)
2

>> (funcall power-of-two)
4

>> (funcall power-of-two)
8

The function won’t work in Emacs Lisp because of its dynamic binding behavior.

I wonder if it is possible to implement the same function in Emacs Lisp without introducing a global variable ?

Answer 1

Update:

By now, Emacs 24 has been officially released, and it supports lexical binding without using lexical-let, when the buffer-local variable lexical-binding is non-nil. See also M-: (info "(elisp) using lexical binding") and pokita’s answer.

---

You can use lexical-let from the Common Lisp Extensions (the “CL package”):

elisp> (require 'cl)
cl
elisp> (setf power-of-two
             (lexical-let ((previous-power-of-two 1))
               #'(lambda ()
                   (setf previous-power-of-two
                         (* previous-power-of-two 2)))))
(lambda
  (&rest --cl-rest--)
  (apply
   (lambda
     (G175638)
     (set G175638
          (*
           (symbol-value G175638)
           2)))
   '--previous-power-of-two-- --cl-rest--))

elisp> (funcall power-of-two)
2
elisp> (funcall power-of-two)
4
elisp> (funcall power-of-two)
8

I’ve also heard about a lexbind branch of GNU Emacs.