Just a few days ago I found a bug in someone's code where a variable was introduced twice with slightly different name, like "var jobno", and then "var jobn". Made me think that Pascal's approach to keep vars declarations at one place is not a bad thing. As for slowing down - probably yes, but I doubt that speedtyping is really a big virtue for a software developer. Also, in a decent IDE it should be possible to make binding/macro to insert declaration after the current function header without jumping away from the current position (though I don't know what Pascal devs use nowadays for IDE)