What are 'closures' in .NET?

Question

What is a closure? Do we have them in .NET?

If they do exist in .NET, could you please provide a code snippet (preferably in C#) explaining it?

Answer 1

A closure is when a function is defined inside another function (or method) and it uses the variables from the parent method. This use of variables which are located in a method and wrapped in a function defined within it, is called a closure.

Mark Seemann has some interesting examples of closures in his blog post where he does a paralel between oop and functional programming.

And to make it more detailed

var workingDirectory = new DirectoryInfo(Environment.CurrentDirectory);//when this variable
Func read = id =>
    {
        var path = Path.Combine(workingDirectory.FullName, id + ".txt");//is used inside this function
        return File.ReadAllText(path);
    };//the entire process is called a closure.