I suspected a control-character bug, and tried having the variable begin with a regular letter. same problem. And it's not "can't use a global in my", but a totally different error, which implies that it thinks the variable is being referenced, not defined!

I just tried another test, and it's not being forced into package main but can co-exist in other packages.

Since it goes away when I'm not strict, it seems like the bug is in recognising a usage before a definition; once passed that, it actually works OK.