It's not only that C doesn't have closures; it doesn't even have anonymous functions. Here's a little Lisp expression that doesn't need closures (mapcar #'(l

It's not only that C doesn't have closures; it doesn't even have anonymous functions. Here's a little Lisp expression that doesn't need closures (mapcar #'(lambda (x) (* x x)) some-list) which squares all the elements of the list. To do that in C you need some abomination like /* Somewhere outside the function where you actually need this */ int square(x) { return x*x; } /* ... */ List *r = List_new(); LIST_FOREACH(self, i, v, List_append_(r, square(v));); Not to mention that this sort of thing tends to get ugly without automatic memory management.