speed?

[Jacob Roman]

I believe it is faster. But I think it may make sence to use & next to a variable rather than a number. What I mean by this is this right here:

Dim A As Long, B as Long

B& = 1
A& = B&

Simply saying A = 1 since variables represent memory locations to store data just shows that you are storing the value 1 into the memory location of A. Values themselves don't really have a data type. But Variables on the other hand do to represent the type of data to store and allocate a number of bytes for that memory location depending on what data type you declared it as. Like 2 Bytes for Integer variables and 4 Bytes for Long variables has been allocated for that memory location.

Now A = B on the other hand, you are saying that you want the memory location's data to be copied into A. Putting the & (Long data type symbol) next to all the variables that are declared as long will let the compiler know what data types they are and prevent conversions from one data type to another. In my opinion, A& = B& will be saying that B's 4 byte long integer register's data will be copied into A's 4 byte long integer register. Saying A = B on the other hand will be saying B's unknown register's data will be copied into A's unknown register. And extra assembly code will be added to convert them to their proper data types, thus slowing things down.




I'm know assembly guru or anything like that, but I believe they can answer that better than I can.