Re: VB language extensions wishlist

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"Pavel Minaev" <int19h@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:5926d394-44a8-4e51-a03c-cecfe86aa831@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
What features would you like to see in a next version of classic VB,
assuming such a thing would happen? Please restrict yourself to
language features and base libraries (such as e.g. Collection), not
IDE or task-specific libraries (UI, database access etc). A few
examples from my own list follow, in no particular order, but feel
free to add your own. Consider it an extensible request for comments.

- A 64-bit integer data type, and unsigned versions of all integer
types.

Would be nice but I'd use names like they did in VB.Net: Int64, Int128, UInt32, etc
Nicely self-documenting

- Ability to define interfaces and classes separately.
- Pointers to data and functions (mostly for interop with C APIs, but
also for occasional optimization).
- Weak references (for cyclic data structures).
- Syntactic sugar to delegate calls to methods of implemented
interface to a wrapped object.
- Universally usable Set

No real interest here in any of those

As Ken noted, just having an updated VB that actually supported existing VB code, at least for the most part, would be the main thing!

I'd add:
a form event to allow subclassing of all messages easily
real class constructors so arguments could be specified
(maybe) a unicode string type to undo the damage done in VB4
nested procedures

Not that there's much point in dreaming about something that will never happen

.