And if you have closures you generally have a garbage collector of some sort or another. But anyways, I don't think closures are more "general" than pointers. Closures form a proper subset of memory access vectors (to use a fairly simple definition of "pointer"), so there are things pointers can do that closures can't. But for that matter pointers themselves are an abstraction for memory addresses that the Real Programmers of Yore used before compilers came in and made us all wimps...
And if you have closures you generally have a garbage collector of some sort or another. But anyways, I don't think closures are more "general" than pointers. Closures form a proper subset of memory access vectors (to use a fairly simple definition of "pointer"), so there are things pointers can do that closures can't. But for that matter pointers themselves are an abstraction for memory addresses that the Real Programmers of Yore used before compilers came in and made us all wimps...