Nice node, but why closures rather than light weight OO? Consider an OO variant of your first example:

use strict;
use warnings;

package Fruit;

sub new {
    my ($class, $fruit) = @_;
    
    return bless {total => 0, fruit => $fruit}, $class;
}

sub Add {
   my ($self, $number) = @_;
   $self->{total} = $self->{total} + $number;
   return "$self->{total} $self->{fruit}" . ($self->{total} != 1 ? 's'
+ : '');
};

package main;

my $apple = Fruit->new ('apple');
my $orange = Fruit->new ('orange');

print $apple->Add (1)."\n";
print $apple->Add (3)."\n";
print $orange->Add (1)."\n";
print $apple->Add (5)."\n";
print $orange->Add (1)."\n";
[download]

Prints:

1 apple
4 apples
1 orange
9 apples
2 oranges
[download]

Ok, a little more verbose, but now you can add more functionality to your fruit object by adding member functions or sub-classing Fruit.

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