I disagree that it wasn't a language fault; it provided very little benefit and directly caused hard-to-diagnose bugs. Being told where the mines are doesn't m

I disagree that it wasn't a language fault; it provided very little benefit and directly caused hard-to-diagnose bugs. Being told where the mines are doesn't make walking across a minefield any more palatable. If it were a good idea it wouldn't still be around. Undeclared variables in PHP produce an E_NOTICE, right? Better than Perl 4, at least. :)