appears kwilson at shuttlebox dot net that you may have just made unintended side effect. Note that adding the global $variable to your test function make the closure function echo second rather than first So the anonymous function works as expected with respect to globals.
<?php
$variable = "first";
$closure = function() {
global $variable;
echo $variable . "\n";
};
$closure();
function test($closure)
{
global $variable; $variable = "second";
$closure();
}
test($closure);
?>
prints:
first
second
tested with php 5.3.1
