I think this is a very good point. I'm no expert, but I know a HUGE amount of old C code isn't thread-safe -- and static has something to do with that?

Not that people shouldn't be allowed to write non thread-safe code in Python, but it shouldn't be encouraged. An awful lot of code is written with no idea that it will be run in multi-threaded code later on.

Personally, I can't think of any times when I would have used this -- maybe because it wasn't there, so I didn't think about it.

 -CHB