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Visual Studio Next Generation: Language Enhancements

By Microsoft, published on 14 Jul 2001
Microsoft
Page 12 of 15
  1. Introduction
  2. New Features
  3. Object Orientated Programming
  4. Inheritance
  5. Encapsulation
  6. Overloading
  7. Polymorphism
  8. Parameterized Constructors
  9. Additional Features
  10. Free Threading
  11. Structured Exception Handling
  12. Type Safety
  13. Shared Members
  14. Initializers
  15. Conclusion

Type Safety

Today the Visual Basic language is very liberal in the implicit type coercions that it will generate. For assignment and for parameter passing other than by reference, the Visual Basic compiler will allow nearly any data type to be converted to any other type by generating runtime coercion. The runtime coercion operation will fail if the value that is to be converted cannot be converted without data loss. Through the addition of a new compilation option, Visual Basic can generate compile-time errors for any conversions that may cause an error at runtime. Option Strict improves type safety by generating errors when a conversion is required which could fail at runtime or which, like the automatic conversion between numeric types and strings, is unexpected by the user.

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Comments

  1. ghanshyam
    12 Nov 2002 at 17:10

    The Object Oriented feature like Inheritance,Polymorphism,Encapsulation in Visual Basic is really a great achievement.Offcourse making a VB program as Multithreaded and allowing STructured exception handling is other great achievements.


    But I beleive there is a potential drawback associated with VB.That is its languag construct.SImultaneously there should be effort in improving the Construct/Style of VB language.
    Otherwise there will be a learning curve for any object oriented C++/Java developer to use VB.
    It cannot be called as a ObjectOriented language unless the Construct of the language is similar to any of the ObjectOrieneted Language.


    Ghanshyam.

  2. Michael Honohan
    01 Aug 2002 at 21:18

    I am not sure if you have your whole VB history down. I learned VB from a Version 2.0 Demo. Also, did you also know there was Visual Basic for DOS?

  3. Developer Fusion Bot
    01 Jan 1999 at 00:00

    This thread is for discussions of Visual Studio Next Generation: Language Enhancements.

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