With regard to "own" or "static", my feeling is that this kind of feature (i.e. mutable shared state visible only to one function) is an anti-pattern in language design. We have much better ways nowadays of sharing state without making it completely global, such as modules and classes. There was a discussion a while back about a "const" statement, which was essentially what we are talking about here except that the name would be read-only. This seems like both a better name and better semantics to me. As I remember, the idea foundered because it was thought too confusing to have an expression that was written inside the function but evaluated outside of it. If we're seriously considering the current proposal, presumably we've gotten over that? Or is it still a valid objection? -- Greg