Neil's News

Polyglot 1: VB

14 August 2004

A year and a half ago I wrote a Perl script to generate images using GD. For me that was the last major unknown in Perl. After that the Perl learning curve approached a horizontal asymptote. Consequently I swore that I'd not use Perl again unless I was merely tweaking an existing program. Since then I've been systematically exploring other languages. Over the next few weeks I'll be reimplementing the earlier image script using other techniques. By the end I hope to have a good reference for painting images in multiple languages.

First is Visual Basic. Yes yes, you can quit laughing. I haven't touched this language in years, and I hope to never do so again. Never the less, it was the original implementation of this program; according to the time-stamp I wrote it in the summer of 2000. It only runs on Windows, it requires a commercial compiler, it requires a 1.3MB runtime library, and it is an ugly illogical language that runs pathetically slow. Did I miss anything ... nope, don't think so.

Here's the VB6 source code and an executable (which requires the massive VB6 runtime DLLs).

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