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In computer programming, an anonymous function (function literal, expression or block) is a function definition that is not bound to an identifier. Anonymous functions are often arguments being passed to higher-order functions or used for constructing the result of a higher-order function that needs to return a function. [ 1 ]
The usual alternative is to use named functions and named recursion. Given an anonymous function, this can be done either by binding a name to the function, as in named function expressions in JavaScript, or by assigning the function to a variable and then calling the variable, as in function statements in JavaScript.
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).
Immediately invoked function expressions may be written in a number of different ways. [3] A common convention is to enclose the function expression – and optionally its invocation operator – with the grouping operator, [4] in parentheses, to tell the parser explicitly to expect an expression.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 5 February 2025. High-level programming language Not to be confused with Java (programming language), Javanese script, or ECMAScript. JavaScript Screenshot of JavaScript source code Paradigm Multi-paradigm: event-driven, functional, imperative, procedural, object-oriented Designed by Brendan Eich of ...
First-class functions have often only been supported in later revisions of the language, including C# 2.0 and Apple's Blocks extension to C, C++, and Objective-C. C++11 has added support for anonymous functions and closures to the language, but because of the non-garbage collected nature of the language, special care has to be taken for non ...
The distinction between the two is subtle: "higher-order" describes a mathematical concept of functions that operate on other functions, while "first-class" is a computer science term for programming language entities that have no restriction on their use (thus first-class functions can appear anywhere in the program that other first-class ...
Previously, JavaScript only supported function scoping using the keyword var, but ECMAScript 2015 added the keywords let and const, allowing JavaScript to support both block scoping and function scoping. JavaScript supports automatic semicolon insertion, meaning that semicolons that normally terminate a statement in C may be omitted in ...