Interview Panel Question

[abhijit]

I was on a panel for taking interviews for a candidate along with one other person. Most of my questions were related to databases and client-server architecture.

Now my colleague popped a question to which I frankly didn't know the answer. He asked whats the difference between a variant and an object.

I personally think there is none, but I was wondering if I had missed something while coding.

[si_the_geek]

An object is a specific data type which is essentially a pointer, and can reference items such as controls/forms/applications. A variable declared "As Object" can contain any object, not just one specific kind ("As Control" would restrict you to just controls).

A variant is an "undefined" data type, and can contain basically any variable, Object or not. There is a memory and speed overhead involved, as information about the actual data type needs to be stored & read/written whenever the variable is used.