Warning: This is the manual of the legacy Guile 2.2 series. You may want to read the manual of the current stable series instead.

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3.4.5 Closure

Consider a let expression that doesn’t contain any lambdas:

(let ((s (/ (+ a b c) 2)))
  (sqrt (* s (- s a) (- s b) (- s c))))

When the Scheme interpreter evaluates this, it

After the let expression has been evaluated, the local environment that was created is simply forgotten, and there is no longer any way to access the binding that was created in this environment. If the same code is evaluated again, it will follow the same steps again, creating a second new local environment that has no connection with the first, and then forgetting this one as well.

If the let body contains a lambda expression, however, the local environment is not forgotten. Instead, it becomes associated with the procedure that is created by the lambda expression, and is reinstated every time that that procedure is called. In detail, this works as follows.

The result is that the procedure body is always evaluated in the context of the environment that was current when the procedure was created.

This is what is meant by closure. The next few subsections present examples that explore the usefulness of this concept.


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