Language
Code written in VBA is compiled to a proprietary intermediate language called P-code (packed code), which the hosting applications (Access, Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint) store as a separate stream in COM Structured Storage files (e.g., .doc or .xls) independent of the document streams. The intermediate code is then executed by a virtual machine (hosted by the hosting application). Despite its resemblance to many old BASIC dialects (particularly Microsoft BASIC, from which it is indirectly derived), VBA is incompatible with any of them except Visual Basic, where source-code of VBA modules and classes can be directly imported, and which shares the same library and virtual machine. Compatibility ends with Visual Basic version 6; VBA is incompatible with Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET). VBA is proprietary to Microsoft and, apart from the COM interface, is not an open standard.
Read more about this topic: Visual Basic For Applications
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)