Programming Groovy 2

4.1 The Convenience of Closures

Closures in Groovy totally remove verbosity in code and help create lightweight reusable pieces of code. To understand the convenience they offer, let’s contrast them with familiar traditional solutions for common tasks.

The Traditional Way

Let’s consider a simple example—assume we want to find the sum of even values from 1 to a certain number, ​n​.

Here is the traditional approach:

def sum(n) {
  total = 0
  for(int i = 2; i <= n; i += 2) {
    total += i
  }
  total
}
println "Sum of even numbers from 1 to 10 is ${sum(10)}"

In the method ​sum​ , we’re running a ​for​ loop that iterates over even numbers and sums them. Now, suppose instead of that we want to find ...