局部变量的作用域应该总是尽可能的小。

在你的例子中，我假设str没有在while循环之外使用，否则你就不会问这个问题，因为在while循环内部声明它不是一个选项，因为它不会编译。

因此，由于str不在循环之外使用，因此str的最小作用域是在while循环内。

因此，答案强调str绝对应该在while循环中声明。没有如果，没有并且，没有但是。

The only case where this rule might be violated is if for some reason it is of vital importance that every clock cycle must be squeezed out of the code, in which case you might want to consider instantiating something in an outer scope and reusing it instead of re-instantiating it on every iteration of an inner scope. However, this does not apply to your example, due to the immutability of strings in java: a new instance of str will always be created in the beginning of your loop and it will have to be thrown away at the end of it, so there is no possibility to optimize there.

编辑:(在答案下面注入我的评论)

In any case, the right way to do things is to write all your code properly, establish a performance requirement for your product, measure your final product against this requirement, and if it does not satisfy it, then go optimize things. And what usually ends up happening is that you find ways to provide some nice and formal algorithmic optimizations in just a couple of places which make our program meet its performance requirements instead of having to go all over your entire code base and tweak and hack things in order to squeeze clock cycles here and there.

在内部，变量可见的范围越小越好。

在while循环之外声明String str允许它在while循环内外被引用。在while循环中声明String str只允许它在while循环中被引用。

正如很多人指出的那样，

String str;
while(condition){
    str = calculateStr();
    .....
}

没有比这更好的了:

while(condition){
    String str = calculateStr();
    .....
}

因此，如果你不重用变量，就不要在变量作用域之外声明变量。

在循环中声明将限制各自变量的范围。这完全取决于项目对变量范围的要求。

在这个问题上对几乎所有人的警告:下面是示例代码，在我的Java 7计算机上，循环内部的速度很容易慢200倍(内存消耗也略有不同)。但这不仅关乎范围，还关乎分配。

public class Test
{
    private final static int STUFF_SIZE = 512;
    private final static long LOOP = 10000000l;

    private static class Foo
    {
        private long[] bigStuff = new long[STUFF_SIZE];

        public Foo(long value)
        {
            setValue(value);
        }

        public void setValue(long value)
        {
            // Putting value in a random place.
            bigStuff[(int) (value % STUFF_SIZE)] = value;
        }

        public long getValue()
        {
            // Retrieving whatever value.
            return bigStuff[STUFF_SIZE / 2];
        }
    }

    public static long test1()
    {
        long total = 0;

        for (long i = 0; i < LOOP; i++)
        {
            Foo foo = new Foo(i);
            total += foo.getValue();
        }

        return total;
    }

    public static long test2()
    {
        long total = 0;

        Foo foo = new Foo(0);
        for (long i = 0; i < LOOP; i++)
        {
            foo.setValue(i);
            total += foo.getValue();
        }

        return total;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        long start;

        start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        test1();
        System.out.println(System.currentTimeMillis() - start);

        start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        test2();
        System.out.println(System.currentTimeMillis() - start);
    }
}

结论:根据局部变量的大小，即使变量不是那么大，差异也可能是巨大的。

只是说，有时候，在循环外或循环内确实很重要。