The right answer for the lifetime question would be: A local lives at least as long as it can be accessed. For a regular value-flavoured local this means: until the end of its visibility. However, an addressable value-flavoured or variable-flavoured local could be accessed through its address far beyond its visibility scope. Ultimately, this would mean that such locals would have to be garbage collected. Since this entails un-Forth-like implementation complexities, we adopted the same cowardly solution as some other languages (e.g., C): The local lives only as long as it is visible; afterwards its address is invalid (and programs that access it afterwards are erroneous).