Simulating Recursive Closures in Elixir

The article starts by explaining the concept of recursive closures, which are functions that call themselves and also capture some context from their creation environment. The author encountered a situation where such functionality was needed in Elixir, inspired by a Haskell function. However, he notes that Elixir and Erlang do not support recursive closures in the same way, primarily because a function variable is only defined after the anonymous function body has been parsed. To overcome this limitation, the author suggests a workaround by extracting the recursive function into a separate named function, maintaining the required context in an accumulator variable, and then selectively applying the context where needed. The article demonstrates this approach using code snippets and compares it to a similar method in Erlang. The author then poses a question to the readers about possible alternative solutions.