global vars within 2-level functions

I have some code, in which I am using the function keyword to create subroutines of code (in otherwords, not true functions but rather reuseable chunks of other code). Yeah, it's ugly, but I need to do it this way for now. So my question is this: One of my subroutine/functions generates a variable. I would like to make this variable available to another subroutine/function, which is called from the first subroutine/function. If what I say is confusing, think of it like this: function1 - creates variable_A - calls function2 function2 - needs to access variable_A The problem is that this variable is not available to function2, even if I use the "global" keyword. The only way I can pass this variable to function2 is if I pass it as an argument. However, in some cases, I need to call function2 without this argument, but this creates some Warnings which I don't want to see. I don't want to just suppress these warnings, how can I either (a) Pass a variable from a function to a subfunction called from the first function (b) Pass a variable as an argument to a function but make that argument optional so that it does not have to exist to make the function legitimate. Thank you, Erik ---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown pricee@hhbrown.com