That is indeed the variant of always I meant :-)

But personally I use non-lexical variables far more often than I do not use strict. @ARGV and $_ for example, or local $/ appear quite regularly in my code. The only times I regularly don't use strict is on one-liners or quick throwaway scripts. In which case I don't bother to lexicalize my variables either. Hmm, seeing that written down, maybe I should bother... And then there's legacy code of course, but I'd consider that code which hasn't been sufficiently refactored. So I would still say, always use strict unless you know better (in which case you don't need advice from the likes of me ;-).This node notwithstanding.