Well, the discussion on declaration of "output" has probably been adequately covered (the answer to which is, of course, that it's only required if standard output is used, explicitly or implicitly. Since "internal" error messages are often handled separately on many (most?) OSes, these aren't an implicit use of "standard output"). For anyone interested, declaration of "output" has two effects - it automatically declares the text file variable "output" and it issues a "rewrite" (according to Kathleen and Niklaus;-).
As for "out-of-order declarations", these ARE permitted by ISO standard ISO-10206 (aka. Extended Pascal).
BTW, I too, disagree with the way that responses to list messages are normally directed to the originator, rather than the list. Maybe if we all share this opinion, we can persuade whoever is responsible to change this?
That has been tried before :-)