Quote:

You could always have the best of both worlds:



Not quite true - $a is declared in the global scope, there is no way of implicitly declaring a variable in the local scope.

This means that if you routinely use this trick to avoid having to explicitly declare variables you may well have implicitly declared the same variable twice in different files or functions.

As you don't have "Explicit" set on, you will not get an error about re-declaring the variable and you will screw up the value of the originally declared variable.

The same will apply if you forget to declare a variable which has already been (implicitly) declared as global - the global variable will be used and you will not get any runtime interpreter errors however your script may not function as intended.