Originally Posted by SDPhantom
Explaining The Reason:
The point of keeping variables in their relevant scope is akin to only allocating memory when you need to use it and proper cleanup when you don't in other languages. All this is done behind the scenes with Lua's garbage collector, but it's still a good practice to follow nonetheless. These so-called "good programming practices" make it easy and simple to program reliable code regardless of which language you're using.
The code posted by Rainrider and Phanx are both correct, although the situations of the variables in question by each are completely different.
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The only reason I was going on about it was because in my testing, merely defining a single variable in the local scope of an OnUpdate function slowed my game's performance to a crawl. Moving that variable outside that scope and reusing it immediately solved the problem.
While it's obvious that, code-wise, a variable should be defined in the smallest scope possible, I think that that is not a tip that belongs in a discussion about optimization
