Why Use Blocks?

Why Use Blocks?

Blocks are objects that encapsulate a unit of work—or, in less abstract terms, a segment of code—that can be executed at any time. They are essentially portable and anonymous functions that one can pass in as arguments of methods and functions or that can be returned from methods and functions. Blocks themselves have a typed argument list and may have inferred or declared returned type. You may also assign a block to a variable and then call it just as you would a function.

The caret symbol (^) is used as a syntactic marker for blocks. For example, the following code declares a block variable taking two integers and returning an integer value. It provides the parameter list after the second caret and the implementing code within the braces, and assigns these to the Multiply variable: