Well, in the 'local' sense of local, I'm not sure. You should be using the 'local' keyword only to temporarily overload some global variable ( mainly anyway ).

In the 'my' sense, which is really 'lexical' I believe, no.

By returning by reference, you've added a second reference to the same data. The original dissapears, leaving you with 1 again. The data won't be nuked until you get to zero references to the data.