I don't think you gain anything this way. Except that you exercise your fingers more. And I don't think it's good to predeclare your variables. You should keep the scope of all variables as small as posible, declaring them only as you intend to start using them. Sometimes it's even good to introduce a block into the code just so that you could specify the scope of a variable, if you want to use it just in those ten lines and not anywhere else. Everything is IMHO of course.