So here's one tool (dare I say pattern?) that might be useful in building a simple API. I'm building on some posts and IRC conversations that I've run across, so most of this is not original with me, but I'm writing it down here for future reference.
In the spirit of classic "design pattern" methodology, here is the scenario we're trying to address. We need to write some functions that refer to some kind of state. The specific example I'm using is connecting to an IMAP server: I want to establish a connection, grab some message headers, selectively grab the message contents, and so on. Obviously, I don't want to negotiate a separate connection for each and ever IMAP operation I write code for. I want to connect once, and then share that connection with each of the functions that needs to use it.
