Presumably the author of Squirrel agrees with (one of) the authors of Lua: "Local by default is wrong" [1].

"The problem is that without local declarations, you cannot say where the variable is local to" [2]. Take Python, for example, where "local by default" means "local to the current function". Variables are created in the current function's scope on assignment, which causes 2 problems:

1. It is awkward to modify variables in outer scopes, because an attempt to assign to them creates a new variable. Python works around this with the `global` and `nonlocal` keywords.

2. Python does not support variables which are local to the current block, for example, the body of a loop.

[1] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-10/msg00056.html [2] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-10/msg00063.html