In a language with clean semantics, the effect of a call to an operation is local; this effect-restrictive property makes it easy for software engineers to understand and reason about their code. However, in order to give clean semantics for procedure calls in the presence of aliasing, it is necessary to view variables that refer to complex objects as mere references into a global store. The reasoning difficulties this indirection introduces do not disappear even when a language designer or a disciplined software engineer avoids explicit assignment of references � the more common source of aliasing. This is because of an independent source of aliasing that arises when procedures are called with repeated arguments and references are copied for parameter passing. This repeated argument problem exists in all well-known imperative languages. We examine the software engineering issues in solving the repeated argument problem, discussing in the process the reasoning problems introduced by aliasing and the benefits of preserving clean semantics. A key design consideration is avoiding value copying, both because it is inefficient and because it cannot, in general, be automated.