The conceptual problem that you had is that static functions operate on
*no* instance of a class rather than *all* instances of a class. Static
functions can only access static variables since the others are not
available (since there's no instance there for them to access).

Yes, that's it exactly! My reasoning was that it looked to me like changing a static variable acted on all members and that this would mean that static functions would work in the same way.

This idea got reinforced by Chuck allowing me to adress static functions as members of instances and it not being very clear *why* this led to issues so I just tried all variations that I could think of.

Oh, well, another great learning experience and another thing found that could stand clarification in the docs. The examples do corectly adress only static variables but they don't explain why they do so. I thought they were taking static integers as a target because that section was explaining those as well and that I could abstract this and aply it to other sorts of things as well.

Thanks for your clear explanation, realy like that way of doing lists as well, BTW.

Kas.