[charltones]

I did a fair amount of real world Lua a few years ago. This issue did start to bother me after my codebase grew. It is fairly easy to work around, mainly due to the very powerful metaprogramming facilities in Lua. See http://lua-users.org/wiki/DetectingUndefinedVariables. I ended up adding a few lines of code to my own common library module which disallowed globals unless specifically declared with my own "declare" function.