Piles of plusses (was Re: comma

[eirik at lurch.stanford.edu]

) Yes, believe it or not, there are reasons why some of us find it better
) to work with languages that do not automatically declare variables - we
) make fewer errors that way.

If it's a good thing in a language to declare all variables, to avoid
problems with typos, and if it's a good thing not to place this burden
on the programmer ... these might seem like conflicting factors, but
in fact they don't conflict if the interface, rather than the
compiler, is what declares variables for the programmer.

This isn't a new idea; smalltalk has done it for years.  It is
completely unobtrusive, in that a programmer who declares everything
up front never sees it except when he wants to, i.e. for typos.