[Radiant] Understanding snippets

[Wes Gamble]

All,

In the Radiant ethic, it states: " *Radiant is primarily designed for 
static Web sites* (that is, sites that are not dynamically generated). 
It is not, and should not become, portal software."

I was under the assumption that snippets were roughly equivalent to 
Rails partials, and assumed that snippets could take local data as input 
just like partials, but this doesn't appear to be the case, based on the 
snippet documentation at http://wiki.github.com/radiant/radiant/snippets 
and the quote above.

I'd just like to verify: Can one pass variable data "into" a snippet and 
have it evaluated at runtime in any way?

Thanks,
Wes