When to declare your variables

I was reading 'Beej's guide to Network Programming' again this morning, and I noticed he declares all his variables at the start of his function.[sub]^{Ex. 1}[/sup] Does anyone else consider this hideous style? Or does it pose some advantages? I can well imagine that it would be easy to check your variables are initialised, but not much else. Personally, I much prefer to declare my variables as and when I use them a la dynamic languages.

[sub][sub]--
1. <snipped>
int main(void)
{
    fd_set master;    // master file descriptor list
    fd_set read_fds;  // temp file descriptor list for select()
    int fdmax;        // maximum file descriptor number

    int listener;     // listening socket descriptor
    int newfd;        // newly accept()ed socket descriptor
    struct sockaddr_storage remoteaddr; // client address
    socklen_t addrlen;

    char buf[256];    // buffer for client data
    int nbytes;

    char remoteIP[INET6_ADDRSTRLEN];

    int yes=1;        // for setsockopt() SO_REUSEADDR, below
    int i, j, rv;

    struct addrinfo hints, *ai, *p;

    FD_ZERO(&master);    // clear the master and temp sets
    FD_ZERO(&read_fds);

    // get us a socket and bind it
    memset(&hints, 0, sizeof hints);
    hints.ai_family = AF_UNSPEC;
    hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM;
    hints.ai_flags = AI_PASSIVE;
    if ((rv = getaddrinfo(NULL, PORT, &hints, &ai)) != 0) {
        fprintf(stderr, "selectserver: %s\n", gai_strerror(rv));
        exit(1);
    }

   <snipped>

>>11

Functions shouldn't be more than 25-50 lines

I hate this nonsense and the morons who keep propagating it. Functions should be as long as it reasonably takes to describe atomic tasks. Arbitrary maximum line counts serve no purpose.