Some have tried to explain why static variables are good. I understand it's needed to preserve state, but what's so wrong about the closures we're using right now? ({ my $foo = 3; sub { ... } }) Maybe some filter can provide some syntactic sugar, because that's what this seems to be all about.
I haven't seen Tie::Static in this discussion yet - is tie not good enough?
Update - Putting money where mouth is - I created a filter :) Filter::Static