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IIRC in a talk the author said that it just generated a function with a made-up unique name, like an internal def in another function.

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That's pretty similar to how languages like Scala with higher-order features translate down to the JVM bytecode (which is subject to certain restrictions).

In general, if some target language entity exists in a named form only, then the corresponding anonymity of those entities in the source language must be simulated via gensyms.

For instance, the branch targets in a while loop are anonymous, right? But in the target language, you must have a named label for the instruction. Solution: machine-generated label.

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