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It is not required to explicitly define an entity before it is used.
Just typing the arrow definition a->b;
will automatically
define entities ‘a’ and ‘b’ if not yet defined. This
behaviour can be disabled by specifying the --pedantic
command-line option or specifying pedantic=yes
chart option.
See Chart Options. Disabling implicit
definition is useful to generate warnings for mis-typed entity names39.
Implicitly defined entities always appear at the very top of the chart. If you want an entity to appear only later, define it explicitly.
To this end, color syntax highlighting underlines an entity name appearing the first time. This allows quickly realizing if the name of an entity is misspelled.