The company I'm working at has a static analysis policy to keep local variable declarations near the beginning of a function. Many times, the usage is many lines after the first line of a function so I cannot see the declaration and the first reference at the same time on the screen. What I do to 'circumvent' the policy is to keep the declaration near the reference, but provide additional scope by using curly braces. It increases indentation though, and some may argue that it makes the code uglier.
