Without the memory keyword, Solidity tries to declare variables in storage.
Lead Solidity dev chriseth: “You can think of storage as a large array that has a virtual structure… a structure you cannot change at runtime - it is determined by the state variables in your contract”.
That is, the structure of storage is set in stone at the time of contract creation based on your contract-level variable declarations and cannot be changed by future method calls. BUT -- the contents of that storage can be changed with sendTransaction calls. Such calls change “state” which is why contract-level variables are called “state variables”. So a variable uint8 storagevar; declared at the contract level can be changed to any valid value of uint8 (0-255) but that “slot” for a value of type uint8 will always be there.
If you declare variables in functions without the memory keyword, then solidity will try to use the storage structure, which currently compiles, but can produce unexpected results. memorytells solidity to create a chunk of space for the variable at method runtime, guaranteeing its size and structure for future use in that method.
memory cannot be used at the contract level. Only in methods.
See the the entry "What is the memory keyword? What does it do?" in the FAQ. I quote it here:
The Ethereum Virtual Machine has three areas where it can store items.
The first is “storage”, where all the contract state variables reside. Every contract has its own storage and it is persistent between function calls and quite expensive to use.
The second is “memory”, this is used to hold temporary values. It is erased between (external) function calls and is cheaper to use.
The third one is the stack, which is used to hold small local variables. It is almost free to use, but can only hold a limited amount of values.
For almost all types, you cannot specify where they should be stored, because they are copied everytime they are used.
The types where the so-called storage location is important are structs and arrays. If you e.g. pass such variables in function calls, their data is not copied if it can stay in memory or stay in storage. This means that you can modify their content in the called function and these modifications will still be visible in the caller.
There are defaults for the storage location depending on which type of variable it concerns:
- state variables are always in storage
- function arguments are always in memory
- local variables of struct, array or mapping type reference storage by default
- local variables of value type (i.e. neither array, nor struct nor mapping) are stored in the stack
