[Newbies] Block and Closure

[Andrey Larionov]

Thanks, all. Now I'm understood differences.

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 20:09, Ralph Johnson <johnson at cs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> In the original Smalltalk, blocks were almost but not quite closures.
> The ANSII standard says they are closures.  As far as I know, all the
> Smalltalks except Squeak make blocks be closures.  So, changing the
> way Squeak implements blocks will bring it into compliance with the
> standard and more like other implementations of Smalltalk
>
> I first ran into the problem of blocks not being closures when I tried
> to write a program like
>
> (1 to: 100) do: [:each | [self process: each] fork]
>
> This will fork 100 processes.  If the first spawned process (the one
> running [self process: 1]) starts to run right away, it will behave
> like I expect.  But suppose the main thread creates all 100 processes
> before it gives up control.  Then the value of "each" will be 100 and
> so all 100 processes will execute [self process: 100], which is not at
> all what I expect.  If blocks were closures then each execution of the
> block would have its own context to store its argument, i.e. there
> would be 100 versions of "each".
>
> You can see a similar problem if you try to implement factorial the
> way that Scheme programmers do it.
>
> |factBlock|
> factBlock := [:x | x <= 1 ifTrue: [1] ifFalse: [x * (factBlock value: x-1)]].
> factBlock value: 100
>
> Squeak complains that you are trying to evaluate a block recursively.
> Most Smalltalk programmers would never try this, so they don't care
> about Squeak's limitations.  But people coming to Squeak from a
> functional programming language are annoyed, because they expect that
> they can do this with blocks, but blocks are not complete closures.
>
> -Ralph Johnson
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