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How to overcome the lack of local variable for emacs lisp closure

Asked 2011-08-05T11:29:35.860
11

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 ?

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12

Emacs24 from bzr now supports lexical binding out of the box; it just isn't activated by default since there are many packages which still deliberately or inadvertently depend on dynamical scoping. Your above code should work just fine in Emacs24 in a buffer where the variable 'lexical-binding' is set to 't'.

answered 2011-08-05T12:03:51.627

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