Hello everybody. I often come across pieces of code wherein the variant type is used seemingly without reason. I'll show you one example from Microsoft (so it's not supposed to be trash code):http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137038/en-us

You'll find that the Ret variable (which is declared as variant) is used to store the return value from the GetPrivateProfileString API call. However, that call no question will return a long. So why did they use the variant type? And this is just one example. Like I said, there's plenty of cases where variants are gonna receive well-defined values. Anybody knows why this happens?

Thank you.