Thread:Extension talk:Scribunto/Environment

From the "Lua environment" section:"Each call runs in a separate environment. Variables defined in one   will not be available from another. This restriction was necessary to maintain flexibility in the wikitext parser implementation." I understand from this that it would not be possible to define a variable at the scope of a transcluding article that would be available to a Lua script. I am thinking of something like  which establishes a "variable" which is then used by any subsequent category links. It would be nice if we could define such things so that, for example, all the references in an article could show the same date format no matter what the input look like. How impossible would this be?