Closures in leu of pointers?

[cts.private.yahoo at gmail.com]

No, actually, it's okay that it's local by default, after all.  TCL's got that capability of explicitly specifying the scope (up n or something like that?).  That's okay for tcl, not sure if it would seem so elegant for python.  But you can't tell me that the scenarios that I presented in the beginning of this thread are intuitive.  I'm going to have a very hard time ever accepting a language that lets me read a variable but when I try to write to it, it suddenly doesn't want to have to do with it anymore ... but hey, like somebody said - everybody's got their own sense of 'plictedness.