Closures in leu of pointers?

[cts.private.yahoo at gmail.com]

exactly that.  Without wanting to analyze it in too much depth now, I would want a local keyword to allow me to know I was protecting my variables, and a way to specify other scopes, without so much implied scoping in non-intuitive ways...

Now everybody is gonna tell me how wrong I am, but you asked what I want, and that's what keeps aggrevating me with python.