‘We need closure,’ said Mr Greg Dyke after resigning as director-general of the BBC. ‘Not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there.’ Over the past couple of months the newspapers have reported the closure of more than one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, of mother-and-baby units, of factories, railway stations and motorways. Some of these closures were more welcome than others.
But Mr Dyke was not proposing the closure of the BBC — a truly radical idea; he was using a metaphor, or, if you prefer, borrowing a bit of psychobabble. He meant much the same by his phrase as Mr Blair meant by ‘drawing a line’ under events.
There is a meaning of closure in computing which I do not quite understand. ‘In a reduction system a closure is a data structure that holds an expression and an environment of variable bindings in which that expression is to be evaluated,’ says the Internet’s Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing helpfully.
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