How to overcome the lack of local variable for emacs lisp closure

Question

I\'m now studying Emacs Lisp from the reference manual and Common Lisp from a LISP Book.

from the Common Lisp book

>> (setf power-of-two
     (let          


        

Answer 1

See this page: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FakeClosures

Answer 2

Emacs24 from bzr now supports lexical binding out of the box; it just isn't activated by default since there are many packages which still deliberately or inadvertently depend on dynamical scoping. Your above code should work just fine in Emacs24 in a buffer where the variable 'lexical-binding' is set to 't'.

Answer 3

another solution using Emacs' unintern symbol:

ELISP> (setf power-of-two
         (let ((p (make-symbol "previous-power-of-two")))
           (set p 1) (list 'lambda '()
           (list 'setf p
             (list '* p 2)))))

ELISP> (funcall power-of-two)
2
ELISP> (funcall power-of-two)
4
ELISP> (funcall power-of-two)
8

Answer 4

Update:

By now, Emacs 24 has been officially released, and it supports lexical binding without using lexical-let, when the buffer-local variable lexical-binding is non-nil. See also M-: (info "(elisp) using lexical binding") and pokita's answer.

---

You can use lexical-let from the Common Lisp Extensions (the "CL package"):

elisp> (require 'cl)
cl
elisp> (setf power-of-two
             (lexical-let ((previous-power-of-two 1))
               #'(lambda ()
                   (setf previous-power-of-two
                         (* previous-power-of-two 2)))))
(lambda
  (&rest --cl-rest--)
  (apply
   (lambda
     (G175638)
     (set G175638
          (*
           (symbol-value G175638)
           2)))
   '--previous-power-of-two-- --cl-rest--))

elisp> (funcall power-of-two)
2
elisp> (funcall power-of-two)
4
elisp> (funcall power-of-two)
8

I've also heard about a lexbind branch of GNU Emacs.