I've been wondering what the reasoning behind REBOL's scoping rules was for awhile. In C, for instance, any variable that you declare in a function is "automatic" (that's what C calls them anyway :). They're automatically local to the function they're defined in, etc. Why does REBOL have variables be globally scoped by default? I ran into this a few days ago when I asked the list for assistance, and people helpfully replied (thank you). One of the things people pointed out was that I wasn't being careful with my recursion and kept using the same global variable over and over again. Perl takes a similar approach, where everything is global unless you declare the variable 'local' or 'my', but I always assumed that this was just because of Perl's heritage as a "throw away" script language, in which cases you really don't have to worry about scoping so much. PHP takes a completely opposite approach. Any variable you declare is local to a function, and you can't even get at global variables unless you explicitly get the variable through the $GLOBALS associative array, or declare a variable 'global' in your function. Anyway, I'd really like to understand why REBOL works the way it does in this respect, so if anyone has any insight to give I'd love to receive it. Thanks so much. Keith
