[kibwen]

> What about statically determining a fixed number of activation records at compile time?

Sure, it may be useful to represent a function's local storage as a first-class concept, and then allow users to instantiate copies of the function at will, if they're willing to allocate more storage themselves, thereby allowing users to either precisely limit the number of instances of a function or otherwise use dynamic allocation to manually reimplement a callstack if they so choose.

> As to lifetime after returning, do you really hate continuations that much?

This is a language that forbids recursion, the functional programmers have already run screaming for the exits. :P