You guys came up with good answers to three of my four questions, which is about what I expected; question 2 was pretty hard. To sum up: QUESTION #1: Why does the termination logic go terminate, terminate, terminate, clear, clear, clear, instead of terminate...

I had some free time on the flight to Canada and my laptop with me, so maybe I will do a little blogging on my vacation after all. A week ago or so a reader asked me to talk a bit about how class termination works in VBScript. Let’s start by looking at...

For the last few weeks we've been doing a line-by-line code review of everything we've written in the last two years. We're doing it in pairs, interestingly enough. There are many judgment calls to make when you do that kind of thing -- on the one hand...

I was highly amused to read on Raymond Chen's blog the other day that mathematicians are hard at work solving the problem of how to most evenly distribute poppyseeds over a bagel . The reason I was highly amused was not just the whimsical description...

No technology today -- but, hey, where does that word "technology" come from, anyway? I'm on this politics/technology/etc. mailing list. A recent poster noted that Donald Rumsfeld, in an interview will Bill O'Reilly on the subject of, of all things...

A reader asked me the other day to riff a bit on why this works: Dim i For i = 1 To 2 print c Next Const c = 10 And this works For i = 1 To 2 print c Dim i Next Const c = 10 but this fails with a "name redefined" error: For i = 1 To 2 print c Const c...

A reader sent me an email over the weekend asking about some odd behaviour in the guts of the JScript engine. Unfortunately, they didn't include an email address that worked; I just got a bounce message back, Ben. Therefore I'll just answer the question...

Here's another recent question I've received on bit twiddling in VBScript: You discussed the issues with interpreting error results that come back interpreted as signed longs last year. Suppose we have a large unsigned long value, something like E18F4994...

I've received some questions recently on how integer arithmetic works in VBScript, so I thought I might spend a few entries talking about some low-level bit twiddling topics. Here's one of the mails I got this morning: There seems to be a limitation on...