What is the difference between a monad and a closure?

Question

i am kinda confused reading the definition between the two. Can they actually intersect in terms of definition? or am i completely lost? Thanks.

Answer 1

They're quite different, although monads will often use closures to capture logic.

Personally I would try to get solid on the definition of closures (essentially a piece of logic which also captures its environment, i.e. local variables etc) before worrying about monads. They can come later :)

There are various questions about closures on Stack Overflow - the best one to help you will depend on what platform you're working on. For instance, there's:

• What are closures in .NET?
• Function pointers, closures and lambda

Personally I'm only just beginning to "grok" monads (thanks to the book I'm helping out on). One day I'll get round to writing an article about them, when I feel I understand them well enough :)