New Language FeaturesLike all of the versions that preceded it, Visual Basic 6 brings changes to the core of its development environment, the language itself. Several new string functions have been added, and certain data types now offer more flexibility when being used with public properties, methods, or functions. Public properties and methods can now use UDTs (user-defined types) as arguments or return value types. Likewise, function and property procedures can return arrays. This will no doubt come as good news to those who have found VB to be too limited in the types of data that can be passed to and from procedures. Object creation has also been enhanced in VB6, specifically in the CreateObject function. In addition to creating local objects, you can now specify an optional machine name and create objects on remote systems. The StrConv function, which can perform several different conversions on strings, has been extended with an optional argument called LCID. The LCID argument enables you to specify a LocaleID for a string different than the local system's LocaleID. Several new object types have been added to VB6. Called the File System Objects, or FSO, these objects include a set of methods that can make working with files and directories easier and faster. The FSO group may be familiar to VBScript programmers, because they originated from scripting languages. Under certain conditions, VB6 will now enable you to assign the contents of one array to another. Although the array that is being copied can be of either a variable- or fixed-size, only variable-sized arrays can be on the left side of the assignment. |
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