erm, yah.. variable scope.. and the six must have been a typo. I'll blame it on blind coding while half awake 
When I was doing development work, I was doing Oracle/SQL and VB (client/server special purpose apps)- both of which are notorious for their variable declarations.. or should I say the lack thereof, in most cases. Code efficiency and data compactness aren't what you are looking for, as much as readability and understandability- because some poor schmuck is going to have to deal with it eventually, when they want to change the code. Way too many bad habits get ingrained when playing by the rules becomes optional. "Forced" back into a strict-syntax language like C, I sometimes pay for all the evils I got away with it seems... at least we can avoid pointer operations in Arduino.. almost guaranteed to confuse even the programmer writing the code...