> I just wish closures were a more first class part of the language like they were in Smalltalk. Functions are first class types and values in Swift. Both name

> I just wish closures were a more first class part of the language like they were in Smalltalk. Functions are first class types and values in Swift. Both named functions and anonymous functions can be used as values and can capture values from outer scopes. What’s not first class? > If language written in 1980 could use closures/lambdas all the way down even for things like if/else, and keep the deception pretty complete, I don’t understand why swift can’t do similiar. Smalltalk’s approach of using higher order functions for all control structures is more uniform in some ways but is not inherently superior. Swift has statements that perform non-local control transfer (break, continue, return) and designing those to work with closures (presumably only non-escaping closures) would be tricky. Also Swift ‘if’ and ‘switch’ statements can perform pattern matching and bind variables in various complex ways, so again it’s not clear if completely unifying all this with anonymous closure syntax would produce something that is simpler overall than just special casing conditionals and loops in the statement syntax.