The act of assigning is creating a variable; the act of using it will complain about an unbound variable. Perl in non-strict mode, PHP last I touched it, Bourn

The act of assigning is creating a variable; the act of using it will complain about an unbound variable. Perl in non-strict mode, PHP last I touched it, Bourne-style shells will just go “yeah, whatever, here’s an empty string”.