In PHP, what is a closure and why does it use the "use" identifier?

This is how PHP expresses a closure. This is not evil at all and in fact it is quite powerful and useful.

Basically what this means is that you are allowing the anonymous function to "capture" local variables (in this case, $tax and a reference to $total) outside of it scope and preserve their values (or in the case of $total the reference to $total itself) as state within the anonymous function itself.

A simpler answer.

function ($quantity) use ($tax, &$total) { .. };

1. The closure is a function assigned to a variable, so you can pass it around
2. A closure is a separate namespace, normally, you can not access variables defined outside of this namespace. There comes the use keyword:
3. use allows you to access (use) the succeeding variables inside the closure.
4. use is early binding. That means the variable values are COPIED upon DEFINING the closure. So modifying $tax inside the closure has no external effect, unless it is a pointer, like an object is.
5. You can pass in variables as pointers like in case of &$total. This way, modifying the value of $total DOES HAVE an external effect, the original variable's value changes.
6. Variables defined inside the closure are not accessible from outside the closure either.
7. Closures and functions have the same speed. Yes, you can use them all over your scripts.

As @Mytskine pointed out probably the best in-depth explanation is the RFC for closures. (Upvote him for this.)

closures are beautiful! they solve a lot of problems that come with anonymous functions, and make really elegant code possible (at least as long as we talk about php).

javascript programmers use closures all the time, sometimes even without knowing it, because bound variables aren't explicitly defined - that's what "use" is for in php.

there are better real-world examples than the above one. lets say you have to sort an multidimensional array by a sub-value, but the key changes.

<?php
    function generateComparisonFunctionForKey($key) {
        return function ($left, $right) use ($key) {
            if ($left[$key] == $right[$key])
                return 0;
            else
                return ($left[$key] < $right[$key]) ? -1 : 1;
        };
    }

    $myArray = array(
        array('name' => 'Alex', 'age' => 70),
        array('name' => 'Enrico', 'age' => 25)
    );

    $sortByName = generateComparisonFunctionForKey('name');
    $sortByAge  = generateComparisonFunctionForKey('age');

    usort($myArray, $sortByName);

    usort($myArray, $sortByAge);
?>

warning: untested code (i don't have php5.3 installed atm), but it should look like something like that.

there's one downside: a lot of php developers may be a bit helpless if you confront them with closures.

to understand the nice-ty of closures more, i'll give you another example - this time in javascript. one of the problems is the scoping and the browser inherent asynchronity. especially, if it comes to window.setTimeout(); (or -interval). so, you pass a function to setTimeout, but you can't really give any parameters, because providing parameters executes the code!

function getFunctionTextInASecond(value) {
    return function () {
        document.getElementsByName('body')[0].innerHTML = value; // "value" is the bound variable!
    }
}

var textToDisplay = prompt('text to show in a second', 'foo bar');

// this returns a function that sets the bodys innerHTML to the prompted value
var myFunction = getFunctionTextInASecond(textToDisplay);

window.setTimeout(myFunction, 1000);

myFunction returns a function with a kind-of predefined parameter!

to be honest, i like php a lot more since 5.3 and anonymous functions/closures. namespaces may be more important, but they're a lot less sexy.

The function () use () {} is like closure for PHP.

Without use, function cannot access parent scope variable

$s = "hello";
$f = function () {
    echo $s;
};

$f(); // Notice: Undefined variable: s

$s = "hello";
$f = function () use ($s) {
    echo $s;
};

$f(); // hello

The use variable's value is from when the function is defined, not when called

$s = "hello";
$f = function () use ($s) {
    echo $s;
};

$s = "how are you?";
$f(); // hello

use variable by-reference with &

$s = "hello";
$f = function () use (&$s) {
    echo $s;
};

$s = "how are you?";
$f(); // how are you?