Re: How to implement lexical closures?

In terms of performance, for stack based languages you might want to
take a look at a technique called lambda lifting (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_lifting). The effect of which is to
reduce a program with closures to a program without closures. However
it is nontrivial to implement(consider the case of functions that
return functions) and as such may be easier to take the memory and/or
performance hit and just pass around closures explicitly.


Explicit closure passing may be implemented as continuations:


abstract class Continuation
{
      Object[] closure;
      Object call(Object[] args);
}


it is important to note also that all top level functions would also
need to use this interface in order to normalize the calling
convention for first-class functions.

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.