scope of local outside function

["John Passaniti" <jmp@...>]

I'm confused.  What's going on here?  I typed the following into a file and
ran it with the "lua" command:

     local x = 42
     print(x)

The result was "42" was printed.  Then I tried the same thing interactively
from the keyboard, and the result this time was nil.

The Lua documentation states that local variables may be declared anywhere
inside a block.  Since running the code from a file worked, does that imply
files have a implicit block around them?  The second question is what
happened to "x" in the interactive case.  No error was reported by Lua, so
I suppose it did what I told it.  But since the value was nil when I
printed it, where did "x" go and will whatever memory it allocated be
reclaimed?