It is polluting the global namespace.
Seven years ago this line was added and even then the variable wasn't
being used but it was a local variable so would have been hard to spot
unless a linter should catch things like that.
Then some four years ago it was accidently converted to a global
variable because the line above it ended in a semicolon rather than
a comma. 'use strict' didn't exist at the time this file was created
and hasn't been added in general yet.
Frank Rehwinkel
a0f6b815e8