In context of GeoCities' recent shut down, my new official website will be at www.skytreader.net. Still lovingly molded by me .

I am thrilled. This is the first time I am actually going to manage a website.

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And something for geeks to think about

A Problem in Functional Programming (especially for Lisp Scheme, especially for PLT Scheme)

Create a function next which has no arguments. It returns the number of times it has been called.

Id est, your interactions might look like this:
>(next)
1
>(next)
2
>(next)
3

It is very easy to do this with a global variable. However, if I use a straightforward global variable, I can do this:
>(next)
1
>global-var
1
>(next)
2
>global-var
2

The challenge: Can you "hide" the global variable so that I cannot access it in my interactions?

The hint: Exploit local

(* This problem did not come from me. I just got this from the internet. I did not transcribe it here in a verbatim manner. What you read here is my interpretation. So, my interpretation might be wrong.)

(** My mood is not "Nervous". Put it to something like "Elated". The only reason that I am labeled "Nervous" is that, for some reason, I cannot change it [does that make sense?]. Maybe, when things go right, I'll just edit this post and set my mood to the appropriate smiley.)

EDIT: (10/27/09) Things are fine now and I have set myself on the appropriate smiley.