I didn't understand your example and reasoning; I'm against that in general, they should be very 'sound' variables, that are always available. If they're empty - they'll be an empty array (which evaluates to false, FWIW).
sure, sentence was hard to parse, forgot to mention 'isset()'.
it *could* be that people rely on the existance of some
$HTTP_GET_VARS or POST_VARS array to start some logic, as follows:
1) variables_order=pc
2) script with some logic, if (isset($HTTP_GET_VARS)) print_out_do_not_try_to_hack_message();
well and if you´re creating these arrays although they´re not listed in variables_order, you´ll break
backwards compatibilty in those (I think very rare) cases
perhaps you already implemented it this way (to take care of variable_order), had no success buildind CVS,
will try again
andré