OO misconceptions

[Alex Martelli]

"Tim Hammerquist" <tim at vegeta.ath.cx> wrote in message
news:slrn9l7a23.rpe.tim at vegeta.ath.cx...
    ...
> Microsoft provides VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) as a glue
> language to script all of its 'Office (9\d|2000)' applications. It's
> like VBScript'ing ASP, but with a different environment.  I don't know
> if this is what this person found, but it's likely.  But I don't think
> that Word et al. "rely" on it.

I believe a substantial portion of Office applications *rely on*
their internal scripting language (VBA) -- at least that's what
MS says when it's trying to sell you a costly license to
integrate VBA into your own applications.  Makes sense, too --
if you have scripting around anywhere, why not use it for those
operations that are not speed bottlenecks?  The proof of the
pudding, I guess, would be removing the VBA engine (or changing
it with a set of dummy DLL's, perhaps, if there is some static
linking involved -- but I don't think there is) -- if Word &c
run fine anyway (except of course for Tools/Macros/...:-), then
the "rely on" bit is just oversell on MS's part, if (as I believe)
some functionality still exists but trying to access other crashes
everything, then MS is correct:-).  Note that things may have
changed somewhat between Office releases, of course (back in '95
there were different VB dialects in different Office apps, then
gradually they all migrated to VBA version 5, and later 6).


Alex