Some basic questions

[Brian Christopher Robinson]

Irmen de Jong <irmen at -NOSPAM-REMOVE-THIS-xs4all.nl> wrote in
news:3e82156d$0$49105$e4fe514c at news.xs4all.nl: 

> Brian Christopher Robinson wrote:
> (Note that recompiling the regex on each function invocation isn't
> very efficient, but that's another story).

Right now I'm not doing a class, just free standing functions.  Is there 
anything akin to C's static keyword for Python functions that will 
initialize a variable once and keep it that way for the rest of the 
execution of the program?