Thanks moritz. Actually, I solved my JS problem by just declaring two different variables, instead of reusing the same variable:

   function sayHello(name) {
      var sayAlert;
      var text = 'Hello ' + name;
      sayAlert = function() { alert(text); }

      var new_text='How confused am I?';
      sayAlert();
    }

    sayHello('Bob');
[download]

Not a terribly meaningful example because I don't actually USE new_text, but...

Perl++ for DWIM!