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Admin
Possibly "VeNTe" == sale (in the sense of the actual act of selling something - a sale, in the sense of an event in a shop where prices are discounted, is "solde"). If that's the intent, then it is, in effect, "sale date".
Admin
I'm honestly surprised that this app is still working anywhere considering the COM and ActiveX reliance of VB. I had a few basic personal apps and all of them cannot be run anymore because they needed components long removed due to security issues, most of the critical. So I can imagine running any VB app this day beside in an air-gapped machine executed in an VM is pretty much just irresponsible.
Admin
vnt is most likely a variant. My mind is also scarred by Visual Basic.
Admin
Variant.
But yeah, Hungarian was everywhere back when I was using VB. Sigils however (the $ and % suffixes for those lucky enough to not know), that's fun. Especially
msYear$, which has both an s (presumably) for String and a $ also for String.Admin
"vnt" surely means "vintage"
Admin
Maybe it's in a Word automation or macro? I think those are still old VB.
Admin
So many "fond" (oy CARUMBA!!!!) memories of doing COM/ASP (NOT .NET) programming back in the 90s. We could fertilize the world with the [crap] we created . . .
Admin
From the currently available BASIC manual on the Thoroughbred Software website:
Despite the increased availability of languages like PL-1, C, and COBOL, BASIC still remains the language of choice within the medium-sized computer business programming community.
Admin
Shouldn't 14 AD become 0-14 using this approach?
Admin
Why? 14 AD is year +14. To be year -14, it would have to be 14 BC.
Admin
Why? 14 AD is year +14. To be year -14, it would have to be 14 BC.
Addendum 2026-09-24 11:15: Stupid Stupid double double posting posting bug bug!!
Admin
014? I love it when you talk octal to me (in C et al)
Admin
As others have said, vnt is variant. It's kind of a universal untyped thing that will accept any type value. I avoided it like the plague.
I know for a fact that VB6 applications are still in use all over the place. At a previous job, we had to hack the VB6 install process so that it would work on Windows 11 so that we could recompile the actual application.
Admin
vnt is definitely Venti, the size of the coffee I want right now, named by a company that steadfastly refuses to name its coffee sizes in a sane way, and whose coffee tastes burnt.
Admin
Right, this is the biggest problem. Owning software that you have to jump through hoops just to run the compiler is a huge gamble. One day, the hacks are going to stop working. I realize that this problem has existed for 20 years (Windows 7 couldn't install the VB6 development environment either), but that's no guarantee that it will work for for the future. Microsoft fixed 774 windows vulnerabilities in the September patch cycle, with that level of acceleration it's even more likely that one of those fixes will break VB6 even worse.
Admin
Hungarian Notation could be eliminated if everyone would just make everything Stringly data.
Admin
I don't know if you did it on purpose, bu it's actually "Ay CARAMBA!!!!" I agree with the rest of your comment :)
Admin
Perhaps idea was to add 0 prefix for years 100-999 ( to make it always 4 digits ?) and developer did not consider years before that ?
Admin
Aka TCL
Admin
The only sense I can make of padding is if it handles dates from 2000 to 2009 (not unlikely if it is made in the 90s) and outputs then in 2-digits format. Of course it would then check for "< 10", not "< 1000", unless it gets the pre-millennium dates as 4-digits and the post-millennium dates as 2-digits. Not to mention that Year() should be returning 4-digit. But maybe if the code was tweaked back and forth enough it gets to this state, and since it works (since the buggy "< 1000" branch never gets triggered) it just stayed that way.
Admin
Ah noes, they don't and never did. MS Office products have been using VBA, different language and implementation. It's basically similar to how Java and JavaScript have basically nothing at all in common but some basic syntax and a word in their name ;-)
Admin
I never had the pleasure of working with Visual Basic itself (I used the language in the context of ASP, which was not good) but we have to admit it was super useful to build the typical small desktop programs with GUI that many small businesses needed. Development was quick and the programs looked good and ran reasonably fast. Today, desktop apps are often slow and ugly, and apparently you need to choose between arcane languages that are hard to master or yet another instance of Chrome in a trenchcoat.
Admin
For some, those BASIC sigils shaped a part of their professional language. If you read msYear$, you say "em es year string", so anywhere you read $, you say "string", as in "cee eytsh arr string" for CHR$ or "ell trim string" for LTRIM$, but then also in "string lang" ($LANG), "sys string login" (SYS$LOGIN), but occassionally also the other ones, "amount percent" (AMOUNT%) or "ratio and" (RATIO&). Hmmm... BASIC...
Admin
That's not exactly correct. The VBA language is the same in both VB the product and in Office. The things that VB the product adds over and above the version hosted in Office are ahead-of-time compilation into native code and the forms engine and runtime library.
Admin
Now, VBScript is very different from VBA, but it's also very much not VB the product. It was its own thing.