Understanding closure in Javascript

Question

I\'m trying to wrap my head around closures in Javascript.

Here is an example from a tutorial:

function greeter(name, age) {
  var message = name + \         


        

Answer 1

I don't think this is a good example for private variables, because there are no real variables. The closure part is that the function greet can see message (which is not visible to the outside, hence private), but it (or anyone else) is not changing it, so it is more of a constant.

How about the following example instead?

function make_counter(){
    var i =0;
    return function(){
        return ++i;
    }
}

var a = make_counter();
console.log(a());  // 1
console.log(a());  // 2
var b = make_counter();
console.log(b());  // 1
console.log(a());  // 3