Re: Recursive anonymous functions?

["Aaron Brown" <aaron-lua@...>]

Bennett wrote:

> To allow an anoymous function to call itself, you can use
> a lexical closure to provide the ability to recurse:

If I understand what you're doing (maybe I don't, since I
don't know Perl) then the equivalent in Lua would be:

  local foo
  do
    lexicalfoo = function()
      print "I am boring"
      lexicalfoo()
    end -- lexicalfoo
    foo = lexicalfoo
  end -- do
  foo()

When foo is called, lexicalfoo no longer exists.

But it seems to me that the whole point of asking whether
anonymous functions can recurse is to find out whether they
can recurse without giving them names.  Of course a function
will be able to recurse if you give it a name and use that
name to make the recursive call.

-- 
Aaron