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Likewise, the macro format XLM — which the article notes is a predecessor to VBA (at which point I'm going, "VBA had a predecessor? but VBA is ancient — its still supported?!") — XML was introduced in 1987, 33 years ago. VBA wouldn't happen until 1993.

Absolutely incredible.




I used some early versions of Excel and am completely shocked the legacy macros still work. Article if you want to do some Win32 programming in XLM.

https://outflank.nl/blog/2018/10/06/old-school-evil-excel-4-...


If with "VBA" you mean Visual Basic for Applications, it had (AFAIK) several ancestors from the BASIC family including Visual Basic and Quick Basic. Probably GW BASIC and its ancestors count as well.


deathanatos seems to be referring to predecessors as a document macro system, not ancestors as a programming language


If you (are crazy enough to) do XLM programming then you will need this: https://github.com/xlladdins/xll/blob/master/docs/Excel4Macr...


> VBA is ancient — its still supported?!

VBA is well supported actually. The community is completely insular and they sometimes complain that they are second to C#, but there is support for the newest .net runtime. Kudos to Microsoft on this one (or not, depending on your opinion). The language changed a lot of course.


That it referred to XLM — that it is both older than VBA and still supported is quite surprising to me. (Given that VBA is no spring chicken.)


Lots of languages are ancient, supported and have predecessor. C++, Perl, Python. JavaScript.


All of those except C++ are younger than XLM. (And C++ has seen — comparatively — regular updates. XLM has faded into obscurity.)




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