Not to start an argument as that's not my intent but why? In primitive languages like C I agree but if the compiler will optimize it well enough or garbage collection will handle it just fine, isn't the smaller scope advantage better? I think it'd be an interesting discussion to have.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/407255/difference-between-declaring-variables-before-or-in-loop
We appeared to have changed it already which is fine, I don't think it's that big of difference considering the small size of the algorithm (as far as maintainability goes). Regardless, we should change our variable names lol.