Hi,
I found this humorous.
Understanding the Parts of VBA “Speech”
If you were going to play soccer using BASIC, the instruction to kick a
ball would look something like
“Kick the Ball”
Hey—this is how we talk! It makes sense. You have a verb (kick) and then
a noun (the ball). In the BASIC code in the preceding section, you have
a verb
(print) and a noun (an asterisk). Life is good.
Here is the problem. VBA doesn’t work like this. No object-oriented
language works like this. In an object-oriented language, the objects
(the nouns) are
most important (hence, the name: object oriented). If you are going to
play soccer with VBA, the basic structure would be:
Ball.Kick
You have a noun—the ball. It comes first. In VBA, this is an object
. Then you have the verb—to kick. It comes next. In VBA, this is a method.
The basic structure of VBA is a bunch of lines of code where you have
Object.Method
Sorry, this is not English. If you took a romance language in high
school, you will remember that they used a “noun adjective” construct,
but I don’t know
anyone who speaks in “noun verb” when telling someone to do something.
Do you talk like this?
Water.Drink
Food.Eat
Girl.Kiss
Of course not. That is why VBA is so confusing to someone who previously
stepped foot in a procedural programming class.
Let’s carry the analogy on a bit. Imagine you walk onto a grassy field
and there are five balls in front of you. There is a soccer ball, a
basketball, a
baseball, a bowling ball, and a tennis ball. You want to instruct the
kid on your soccer team to
Kick the soccer ball
If you tell him kick the ball (or ball.kick
), you really aren’t sure which one he will kick. Maybe he will kick the
one closest to him. This could be a real problem if he is standing in
front of
the bowling ball.
Jim
Jim Homme,
Usability Services,
Phone: 412-544-1810. Skype: jim.homme. NonVisualDevelopment.org: Blind
people can drive computers <http://www.nonvisualdevelopment.org/>.
Demonstration GUI Programs: You can program GUI's while blind.
<http://www.fruitbasketdemos.org/>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This e-mail and any attachments to it are confidential and are intended
solely for use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed.
If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender
immediately and then delete it. If you are not the intended recipient,
you must not keep, use, disclose, copy or distribute this e-mail without
the author's prior permission. The views expressed in this e-mail
message do not necessarily represent the views of Highmark Inc., its
subsidiaries, or affiliates.
