Meeting 11

I'd say that this is what block scoping was ietnnved for. Although rarely used or at least intentionally thats why you can always enclose things with {} and get a scope. First off it basically negates the need to set to null. Second off, this is the ultimate trick for efficiency nuts since it clues the VM/compiler to the fact that this is a nice place to do direct register assignment. Of course I bet the first IO call you make negates all of thse tricks If you're using web services or RMI or whatever than this is the least of your worries.