Why does VBA allow some declarations to be changed by later references

[tfurnivall]

It's a Saturday morning, and I gad a couple of minutes froo to explore something which has been bugging me for some time.

I have a module which declares and defines an Enum:

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With pretty well every other declaration, the capitalization I use to define values and variables is cast in concrete at the point where I define/declare them.

As an example:

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Then later on, no matter how I reference it (eg):

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VBA will kindly impose the capitalization with which I defined it, and it shows up (after a split-second) as:

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I like this. I can have fun with the declaration, and provided I get it 'right' (ie what I want to have be used everywhere), VBA will enforce it with nary a disapproving glance.

Not so with my poor old Enum (and occasionally with other constants). If I set up the declaration given above:

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where are all the Option values are preceded by a lower case "o", then adopt my admittedly lazy way of referencing them, VBA simply allows whatever I use as the most recent reference to replace the original declaration:

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changes the original declaration and the rest of the module - if not the project to the new capitalization. In defence of VBA all I can say is that it is equally non-judgmental, and does it silently without comment.

It makes debugging very difficult! And it looks ghastly.

Now - there is obviously some code somewhere in the IDE which 'normalizes' capitalization. It's just that it looks as if the lines of code are in the wrong sequence for this use case. I'm imagining something like:

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But for this particular case we get:

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Has anybody else noticed this? And does it bug you as much? And if so, how do you deal with it (except painfully to correct it after each egregious change)?

[6StringJazzer]

I do not know the answer to your question about why this happens. However, VBA code is case-insensitive. The automatic application of capitalization for a declared variable is just for formatting. The following will get you a compile error:

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They are the same variable name as far as VBA is concerned.

So I get that the behavior you are seeing for Enum value names is annoying, but it's not material. Not sure how it affects your debugging.

[tfurnivall]

I agree with your statements, Jim. I applaud the decision to make VBA case-insensitive (one of the biggest design flaws of C, IMHO).

However, when looking at a line of code where the capitalization has been changed from a (hopefully less eccentrically) carefully constructed Camel Capitalization which has been inadvertently reformatted to all lower case (by my haste and admitted laziness) it doesn't affect the code, but it can take a few seconds(/minutes?) to figure out just what this nice meaningful long name really was.

I can certainly love with this strange behaviour, but it's the inconsistency that bugs me.

Thanks for your comment,

Tony

[6StringJazzer]

I agree with how it bugs you, Troy. I don't know if it's intentional, but if it's a bug you would think they could have fixed it after a couple of decades.

[tfurnivall]

I'm with you, 6String, but I'm sure you know that after a couple of years things like this must be left alone, by company policy in case fixing it breaks something for someone (!)