Over all, it should be ok to merge, just with the note that it is preferred to declare the variable at the beginning of the block. A few in this PR are in the middle.
It is ok to have them at the beginning of the functions or at the beginning of the blocks, e.g.,:
``` if(cond) { int v; ... v = ... } ```
Also, I think that rather recent someone reported that declaring the iterator variable in the `for` (i.e., `for(int i = 0; ...) { ... }`) was giving some error on some old but still used OS. So maybe it should still be avoided for a while.
I think there are places in the code where the above suggestions were not followed, but thought it worth listing them here.