Does MS Excel use Macros internally?

Question

I have always wondered if whatever actions we do are actually translated into VBA Macros before it is executed. Is that how we are able to record macros? If not, would you call it a redundancy in design? Would it be faster/slower it ain't the way it is now?

Answer 1

No, they aren't translated. What happens is that most UI commands execute the same code as the VBA commands.

Also, VBA isn't executed directly but the code is first translated to byte code, a compact form of the code which allows to quickly look up which compiled routine to invoke.

In recent years, with much more powerful computers, I've toyed more than once with the idea to turn an application into a huge library for a scripting language and then implement the UI with said scripting language - that would allow for the ultimate personalization of the app.

Sadly, people still hang to the idea to do UIs in XML or C++ than in Python or LUA which would be much faster to write and change. Can you say "It's always been that way"?