What does putting an exclamation point (!) in front of an object reference variable do in Visual Basic 6.0?
For example, I see the following in code:
!RelativePath.Value = mstrRelativePath
What does the ! mean?
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311answers:
2
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A:
It is almost certainly a statement inside a With block:
With blah
!RelativePath.Value = mstrRelativePath
End With
which is syntax sugar for
blah("RelativePath").Value = mstrRelativePath
which is syntax sugar for
blah.DefaultProperty("RelativePath").Value = mstrRelativePath
where "DefaultProperty" is a property with dispid zero that's indexed by a string.
Hans Passant
2010-03-02 19:47:02
Is anything more than syntatic sugar?
Ben McCormack
2010-03-02 19:49:23
@Ben: I cannot parse your question. Guessing: no, it is just sugar.
Hans Passant
2010-03-02 19:59:24
Ben probably means that all higher level programming is "just syntactic sugar" - in theory you could write the same functionality in machine code.
MarkJ
2010-03-03 09:15:51
@nobugz I forgot the word "it." Is *it* anything more than syntatic sugar? The reason I ask the question is because in your question you said, "which is syntax sugar for". Is it *only* syntax sugar? I'm wondering if perhaps it might help speed up runtime of the application as well or are there other side effects with using a `!` instead of writing out all of the code.
Ben McCormack
2010-03-04 01:15:43
No, the exact same code gets generated.
Hans Passant
2010-03-04 02:04:22