Thanks to Jay et merci a Alain. These examples are clear to the point of 
elegance!  I knew that rolling my own array indices with PEEK and POKE 
could solve the problem (as would making them global) - I just hoped 
that I had missed (as usual) something obvious that the compiler could 
do for me.  Clearly, the compiler doesn't handle multi-dimensional 
arrays easily for this situation; my suspicion is that it could, 
however.  It would probably not be worth implementing - especially so if 
the implementation would have the side effect of slowing down other 
array indexing!
    It is a pity that we don't seem to have a lexicon in which we cold 
look up topics like 'array passing' or, for example, dreferencing of 
pointers and handles (I've never been able to figure out how to 
dereference a handle).  And then there's all the arcane notation that 
has crept into the language, like 'thing..otherthing' and others also 
mentioned in the "Switching Example Questions" in Issue 2285 as well. 
FB has become a pretty steep learning curve and could be improved a lot 
with a guide to these kinds of syntactical issues.  I don't believe that 
a tutorial is called for - merely an indexed listing that could help 
programmers coming from other languages, a dictionary in which we could 
quickly look up topics and conventions.
    That said, I'd like to add a pean to FB^3 and its developers and for 
this community  of almost unfailingly patient and good natured expert 
helpers.  A great job! But for the fact that we are limited [sic] to the 
top 4% of  the PC market FB could and should be recognized as the marvel 
it has become.  I like the fast code, the excellent editor, the graceful 
possibility for inline Assembly and now the wonders of Threaded FNs and 
Unix in r7.  Most of all I appreciate not being bound by an intrusive 
OOP paradigm that does not come easily to a septuagenarian proceduralist.
Thank you all.  Hayden