VB/VBA Variable Declaration Coding Standard - White Space

Question

What is the significance of declaring variables in VB/VBA like so:

Private m_sName         As String
Private m_lAge          As Long

As opposed to;

Private m_sName As String
Private m_lAge As Long

I am working on a project which up to now uses the latter, and has done since long before I joined the project. Two new developers have joined the team and have begun to use the former. I have seen such pagination previously and wondered; what is its heritage and what advantages/disadvantages does it have? My own preference has always been the latter and remains so, as much for consistency as anything else.

Answer 1

This is a coding convention from old C-days, where you had endless structs and you wanted to see the types and variable names starting in the same column. Do as you prefer!

Answer 2

In the days when code editors were much dumber and were little more the text editors it was easier to maintain the "column-style" (the former example) of code. However even then it could be a pain when changes would require manual re-orginisation of code.

But then intellisense and auto-formatting came along and made it really difficult to maintain the "column-style" formatting code. Change something in the line and the IDE automatically eliminated "unnecessary" white-space.

I'm all for readability but not to this extent, stick with latter style.

Answer 3

Easier to read, in my opinion. You can clearly see the variable name and type in the former, whilst the latter becomes more difficult with more variable declarations.

Answer 4

It's only a matter of readability. Multiple whitespaces in VB/VBA are ignored.

I'd use the former because it's more readable, but Visual Studio has its own formatting rules and will remove extra whitespaces, so I have to use the second form. :)