Doesn't JavaScript support closures with local variables?

Question

I am very puzzled about this code:

var closures = [];
function create() {
  for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
    closures[i] = function() {
      alert("i = " + i);
    };
  }
}

function run() {
  for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
    closures[i]();
  }
}

create();
run();

From my understanding it should print 0,1,2,3,4 (isn't this the concept of closures?).

Instead it prints 5,5,5,5,5.

I tried Rhino and Firefox. Could someone explain this behavior to me?

Answer 1

Fixed Jon's answer by adding an additional anonymous function:

function create() {
  for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
    closures[i] = (function(tmp) {
        return function() {
          alert("i = " + tmp);
        };
    })(i);
  }
}

The explanation is that JavaScript's scopes are function-level, not block-level, and creating a closure just means that the enclosing scope gets added to the lexical environment of the enclosed function.

After the loop terminates, the function-level variable i has the value 5, and that's what the inner function 'sees'.

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As a side note: you should beware of unnecessary function object creation, espacially in loops; it's inefficient, and if DOM objects are involved, it's easy to create circular references and therefore introduce memory leaks in Internet Explorer.