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Nested functions can be used for unstructured control flow, by using the return statement for general unstructured control flow.This can be used for finer-grained control than is possible with other built-in features of the language – for example, it can allow early termination of a for loop if break is not available, or early termination of a nested for loop if a multi-level break or ...
Non-local variables are the primary reason it is difficult to support nested, anonymous, higher-order and thereby first-class functions in a programming language. If the nested function or functions are (mutually) recursive, it becomes hard for the compiler to know exactly where on the call stack the non-local variable was allocated, as the frame pointer only points to the local variable of ...
nested blocks of imperative source code such as nested if-clauses, while-clauses, repeat-until clauses etc. information hiding: nested function definitions with lexical scope; nested data structures such as records, objects, classes, etc. nested virtualization, also called recursive virtualization: running a virtual machine inside another ...
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
The Algol family has allowed nested functions and higher-order taking function as arguments, but not higher-order functions that return functions as results (except Algol 68, which allows this). The reason for this was that it was not known how to deal with non-local variables if a nested-function was returned as a result (and Algol 68 produces ...
This can be only top-level blocks like functions and classes, nested blocks like nested functions and methods, or all blocks, notably control-flow blocks. This allows one to get an overview of code, easily navigating and rearranging it, and to drill down into more detail as needed, without being distracted by other code.
A higher-order function is a function that takes a function as an argument or returns one as a result. This is commonly used to customize the behavior of a generically defined function, often a looping construct or recursion scheme. Anonymous functions are a convenient way to specify such function arguments. The following examples are in Python 3.
Numeric literals in Python are of the normal sort, e.g. 0, -1, 3.4, 3.5e-8. Python has arbitrary-length integers and automatically increases their storage size as necessary. Prior to Python 3, there were two kinds of integral numbers: traditional fixed size integers and "long" integers of arbitrary size.