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brzak brzak is offline
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Default I don't like variants but...

Form what i hear / read, there are many reasons not to use a variant.
I've found couple of nice uses for it though and would like to get
some feedback on what other people think.

One example i would have thought where it's use would be allowable
would be if there is a case where a loop through a group is required
that does not follow any simple pattern.

Say four of the seven days in the week required traversing:

Sub Using_Variant()
Dim Day As Variant
For Each Day In Array("Monday", "Wednesday", "Saturday",
"Sunday")
Debug.Print Day
Next Day
End Sub

seems tidier than:

Sub Without_Using_Variant()
Dim Day(1 To 4) As String
Dim n As Integer
Day(1) = "Monday"
Day(2) = "Wednesday"
Day(3) = "Saturday"
Day(4) = "Sunday"
For n = LBound(Day) To UBound(Day)
Debug.Print Day(n)
Next n
End Sub


I'd be interested to see what other more experienced people might
think.

What is the point of a variant? It must exist to serve some purpose?
To me it seems a bit lazy to use it, as you should know what you want
- is it to overcome incompatibilities between the existing data types?

And getting back to the above example, if the day name was used
extensively, even though the variant takes a string and has type
Variant/String - would the loss in performace mean that those extra
few lines at the start would be worth it.

The second option would be more attractive if it were possible to do
this:

Dim Day(1 to 4) as String
Day() = Array("Monday", "Wednesday", "Saturday", "Sunday")

but no, the number of lines taken up is dictated by the number of
elements in the array...

Thanks for listening1