VBA Internals: What's in a variable

Language designers and runtime authors are always telling us to ignore implementation details. For the most part, including for VBA, that's good advice. But sometimes you need or want know how things really work under the covers. In VBA this often arises when importing windows API functions which require pointers. To really understand pointers in VBA you first have to understand variables in VBA. In this article I'll delve into the gritty implementation details of variables in VBA.

VBA background

Language vs runtime: An aside on terminology

The VBA language and the VB runtime are not technically the same thing. The language is the syntax described by the VBA language specification, while the runtime is a bundle of utility functions that make implementing the language a lot easier. The runtime is a specific COM dll: msvbvmXX.dll for stand-alone classic VB applications, VBEX.dll for Office. You could use the functions in the VB runtime library from any COM-aware language. The actual implementation of VBA is in the compiler included with the last version of Visual Studio before .NET, and with Microsoft Office. These compilers in turn use the VB runtimes for a lot of the implementation work. For the purposes of this article I'll treat the language, the compiler, and the runtime as the same thing. The fact is there isn't any widely distributed implementation of the VBA language apart from Microsoft's VB compiler and runtime.

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