Maybe Node should be strict by default? I can understand it not being the case for browsers that need to support legacy code, but for Node it doesn't really need to care about that.
I think, if anything, requiring it to be in a comment would have been less odd; at least comments imply a sense of "meta"-ness.
The string literal doesn't make anyone _happy_, but it was most compatible with the existing widely deployed toolchains, as I understand.
Yes, on the other hand it's quite necessary to not have non-compliant browsers blow up. `"use strict";` is just a noop in e.g. IE6. `use strict;` would be an error in it.
> I think, if anything, requiring it to be in a comment would have been less odd; at least comments imply a sense of "meta"-ness.
Javascript compressors definitely strip comments. They probably don't strip strings.
use v5.12;