Modern programming languages provide a mixture of primitives for composing programs. Most notably Scheme, Smaltalk, Ruby, and Scala have direct language support for parameterized delayed-execution blocks of code, variously called lambda, anonymous functions, or closures. These provide a natural way to express some kinds of abstractions that are currently quite awkward to express in Java. For programming in the small, anonymous functions allow one to abstract an algorithm over a piece of code; that is, they allow one to more easily extract the common parts of two almost-identical pieces of code.

Closure Literals

We introduce a syntactic form for constructing an anonymus function value:

Primary:
ClosureLiteral
ClosureLiteral:
{ FormalParametersopt => BlockStatementsopt Expressionopt }

Evaluating the closure literal expression results in a closure instance . A closure instance is converted to some object type by a closure conversion. In the nominal version of the specification, it is a compile-time error if a closure literal appears in a context where it is not subject to a closure conversion. In the functional version of the specification, if a closure literal is not subject to a closure conversion it is converted to the corresponding function type of the closure literal, which is the function type with: identical argument types; a return type that is the type of the final expression, if one exists, or java.lang.Unreachable if the closure literal's body cannot complete normally, or void otherwise; and a throws type list corresponding to the checked exception types that can be thrown from the body of the closure literal. The conversion, in either case, occurs entirely at compile-time.

A closure literal captures a block of code - the block statements and the expression - parameterized by the closure literal's formal parameters. All free lexical bindings - that is, lexical bindings not defined within the closure literal - are bound at the time of evaluation of the closure literal to their meaning in the lexical context in which the closure literal appears. Free lexical bindings include references to variables from enclosing scopes, and the meaning of this, break, continue, and return. Evaluating the closure literal does not cause the statements or expression to be evaluated, but packages them up at runtime with a representation of the lexical context to be invoked later.

At runtime, if a break statement is executed that would transfer control out of a statement that is no longer executing, or is executing in another thread, the VM throws a new unchecked exception, UnmatchedNonlocalTransfer. Similarly, an UnmatchedNonlocalTransfer is thrown when a continue statement attempts to complete a loop iteration that is not executing in the current thread. Finally, an UnmatchedNonlocalTransfer is thrown when a return statement is executed if the method invocation to which the return statement would transfer control is not on the stack of the current thread.


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Varun Rathore