This a conceptual question on how one would implement the following in Lisp (assuming Common Lisp in my case, but any dialect would work). Assume you have a function that creates closures that sequentially iterate over an arbitrary collection (or otherwise return different values) of data and returns nil when exhausted, i.e.

(defun make-counter (up-to)
  (let ((cnt 0))
    (lambda ()
       (if (< cnt up-to)
           (incf cnt)
           nil))))

CL-USER> (defvar gen (make-counter 3))
GEN
CL-USER> (funcall gen)
1
CL-USER> (funcall gen)
2
CL-USER> (funcall gen)
3
CL-USER> (funcall gen)
NIL
CL-USER> (funcall gen)
NIL

Now, assume you are trying to permute a combinations of one or more of these closures. How would you implement a function that returns a new closure that subsequently creates a permutation of all closures contained within it? i.e.:

(defun permute-closures (counters)
  ......)

such that the following holds true:

CL-USER> (defvar collection (permute-closures (list 
                                                 (make-counter 3)
                                                 (make-counter 3))))
CL-USER> (funcall collection)
(1 1)
CL-USER> (funcall collection)
(1 2)
CL-USER> (funcall collection)
(1 3)
CL-USER> (funcall collection)
(2 1)
...

and so on.

The way I had it designed originally was to add a 'pause' parameter to the initial counting lambda such that when iterating you can still call it and receive the old cached value if passed ":pause t", in hopes of making the permutation slightly cleaner. Also, while the example above is a simple list of two identical closures, the list can be an arbitrarily-complicated tree (which can be permuted in depth-first order, and the resulting permutation set would have the shape of the tree.).

I had this implemented, but my solution wasn't very clean and am trying to poll how others would approach the problem.

Thanks in advance.