I see, thanks. Well that's a damn shame. Makes it very much harder to write self-contained objects when the objects access to external variables is limited like that. I suppose a workaround is to use a Bank, have the object resize it and put the contents of the string into it, and then get it back out to a variable again later, but it's going to be quite slow and it's a pretty ugly solution since you have to manually update the variable from the bank.