Unforuately, a reference to the object must be passed to the function, and the OP explicitely requested that the solution didn't do this. I do like passing a state object as you suggest, though. There's much less hidden mojo that way.

Sorry for this banal reply. The original version of it was completely wrong.

In reply to Re^2: Making a variable in a sub retain its value between calls by ikegami
in thread Making a variable in a sub retain its value between calls by crashtest

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