The last edition of this book contained a sidebar entitled “No Pointers in Basic.” I promised that the next version of Visual Basic would not support pointers. But here they are.
The AddressOf operator gives Basic programmers a feature they’ve long requested, but in a format so crude and fraught with danger that the inventor of Basic, the late John Kemeny, would be shocked. Although something is better than nothing, I can’t say I approve of this un-Basic throwback to the bad old days of PEEK, POKE, SADDR, and VARPTR. I lobbied for high-level type-safe procedure variables usable in Basic—similar to the feature enjoyed by programmers in Pascal, C, and even the wretched FORTRAN.
But enough groaning and complaining. Let’s make do with what they gave us. Procedure pointers will put your hacking skills to the ultimate test.