>Quite frankly, I hadn't considered either of these points. My questions about "what harm does it cause" seem to have been answered and I may (shudder) actually have to change my mind.

Having standards is great when they serve a purpose. <g> Not so great when it's mostly voodoo or "because that's the way I like it". (This is a hot button for me.)

Just last week, I sent email to our dev staff nagging them about not following our own internal _documented_ coding standards. We put out a new release that promptly blew up at a customer's site because of it.

The standard is a simple one:

* All variables will be explicitly declared (scoped)
* All variables will be initialized with a plausibly correct value (setting type) before use

Had these two rules been followed, our customer would not have seen a crash.

Safer code is, IMO, a good reason for standards. Not "I think it's clearer". ;-)

JOMO

Dan