I sure this will never happen to you or your code but what would happen if someone pass the code through a automate code translator ... say Perl 5 to Perl 6 or Fortran77 ... god knows. What would happen then? You don't know do you. It all depends on what the translator does, doesn't it? Or how the other language wants to initialize things. Since you did not implicitly initial your variables. I hope you remain blissfully unaware.