why ; ?

[bearophile]

Don:
> But my experience 
> with PHP is that absence of declarations is the number 1 source of bugs 
> in that language. And it manifests itself as an initialization problem 
> -- I DID initialise that variable, but because of a typo, I find that 
> it's unexpectedly zero!

I think here there's a difference between Python and PHP, Python creates variables only when you write them, not when you read them.

Bye,
bearophile