defun in defun is not local?

Question

I am reading SICP to learn Lisp, the book uses Scheme dialect. I want accommodate it to emacs lisp, I find something weird in 3.1.1 and cannot figure it out, say I have a test.el file:

(defun make-account ()
  (defun withdraw (amount)
    (print "in withdraw"))
  (lambda () 'withdraw))


(setq a (make-account))
(withdraw 10)

Execute this file with command emacs -batch -l test.el yields "in withdraw". Why is not function withdraw local in make-account?

And if I comment out (setq a (make-account)), it complains about Symbol’s function definition is void: withdraw.

What am I missing here? Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Use cl-labels to define local functions (cl-flet works, but recursive function reports error), and in the beginning of the .el file enable the lexical scoping:

;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
(defun make-account ()
  (cl-labels ((withdraw (amount)
                        (print "in withdraw")))
    (lambda () #'withdraw)))

Remember the # before the quoting of function name (for why # is needed, see link).

I've tested this in ielm mode, the output of (make-account) is:

ELISP> (make-account)
(closure
 ((--cl-withdraw-- closure #1
                   (amount)
                   (print "in withdraw"))
  t)
 nil --cl-withdraw--)

We can see that the closure for withdraw is returned.

Thanks to @stefan and @db48x for helpful information.

Answer 2

You probably want to use flet:

(defun make-account ()
  (flet ((withdraw (amount)
                   (print "in withdraw")))
    (lambda () 'withdraw)))