I'll be danged; they're right. I forget where I read it, but there was an interesting list of the top 10 or 50 or some such reasons someone hated VB, and one that I said to myself, "This can't be true. Maybe in VB 4 or something earlier, but no way in VB 6," turns out to be true after all.

Say you have a line like this, declaring two TextStreams:

Dim ts1, ts2 As TextStream

Welp, ts2 is a TextStream, but ts1 ain't nuttin' but a Variant. I've even got "Option Explicit" at the top of the page, forcing me to declare each of my varaibles before starting to use them. But somehow the VB compiler hackers decided to take a shortcut and make everything not explicitly next to an "As" cast to a Variant.

I wasn't getting Intellisense in my latest "quickapp" and *voila*, that's why. I was doing the exact same thing, give or take, with ts1 and ts2 (horrible names, I know, but this is a "quickapp for me") and only ts2 was autocompleting. Bizarre.

The right syntax for this, fwiw, is apparently:

Dim ts1 As TextStream, ts2 As TextStream

I'm not sure whether to say this is a horribly low-quality hack that MS let out, or to applaud the lazy-but-clever programmer for producing a hack that never got uncovered by QA. :^)