why are local series static?

[DrenThales]

I was just wondering why local series are static (why they keep their state after leaving the local block)? Numeric variables, on the other hand, do not. Also, when comparing local series that have the same value but different scope to each other with =?, true is returned. Does this imply that all series of the same value are stored at the same location?

[btiffin]

Short (meaningless) answer; REBOL attempts to optimize storage of series data and scalar data it treated a little differently.

For some details discovered by an intrepid REBOL explorer, check out the Ladislav Mecir articles.
http://www.fm.tul.cz/~ladislav/rebol

For a treatise on Series; http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/REBOL_Programming/Language_Features/Series

For the equality questions;
http://www.fm.tul.cz/~ladislav/rebol/identity.html
and
http://www.fm.tul.cz/~ladislav/rebol/contexts.html

These articles are not for the faint of heart and may take two or three read throughs with some experimenting, but are well worth the effort.

Cheers

[Sunanda]

REBOL3 will (most likely) support closures -- so all functions of that type will have local values:

http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Closures