Agreed. I was trying to show how simple a previous post concern could be.

However, “if you don’t want it to be called outside the current context, don’t give it out,” is not so simple. As you may want subclass or package privacy, no?

Isaac

This is also why implementing generics using type erasure is bad. I do have to know the implementation details. The closure spec seems to fall more into the latter camp.

Stuffing as many ideas into one line of code as possible seems bad, true, but:
Stuffing as many lines of code into one idea as possible also seems bad.

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” — Abraham Lincoln, who was not a Java programmer.

Good programmers can make a good decision about how many ideas per line of code are good. It’s not the language’s responsibility to make that decision for you.

Neal goes through the reasons in this talk: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=4051253555018153503

By the way, there’s no use in making an anonymous function public/private. If you don’t want it to be called outside the current context, don’t give it out. When you make a StringBuffer, you don’t set an access level, so why would you do it for a Function?

What’s wrong with a simple implementation like:

Function<String> f = new Function<String>(String someArg, int anotherArg) {
String result = someArg + “, ” + anotherArg;
return result;
};

f.setAccess(Function.PUBLIC);

String s = f(”foo”, 2);

Function f = new Function(String someArg, int anotherArg) {
String result = someArg + “, ” + anotherArg;
return result;
};

f.setAccess(Function.PUBLIC);

We already use all of this syntax and it resembles anonymous class declarations. Its not unlinke closures on some scripting languages either.

BTW, John DeHope’s first reply is quite an eloquent way of pointing out why Java desperately needs closures (and why it should have had them earlier). Its that sense that we are have to write too much code to achieve our goal (simple, clear, easy to read later, logic). One response is to break everything down to one item per line. IMO, this isn’t the right response, but in the absence of closures it may be all we have. Its all explained better in the Kingdom of the Nouns - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html. And I even agree with Slava in a way - teaching a language without closures no longer seems sensible to me.