Groovy: meaning of 'this' inside a closure

Question

The following example is adapted from \'Groovy in Action\'

class Mother {

    Closure birth() {                            
        def closure = { caller ->         


        

Answer 1

Take a look at page 144

...this refers to the closure, not to the declaring object. At this point, closures play a trick for us. They delegate all method calls to a so-called delegate object, which by default happends to be the declaring object (that is, the owner). This make the closure appear as if the enclosed code runs in the birthday context.

For your questions;

this inside a closure evaluates to the scope in which the closure is called?

from the book they state that "this refer to the closure, not to the declaring object" But from bertport and my experiment, it seems "this" is actually the declaring object.

Either ways, the answer is still "no" for your question.

within the closure shown above, this and caller refer to the same scope?

I'm afraid not.

Be aware that page 143 and 144 in Groovy in Action need some corrections

http://groovy.canoo.com/errata/erratum/show/5

http://groovy.canoo.com/errata/erratum/show/8