Slashdot | VBA Going Away, Macs Now, PCs Soon:As Microsoft drops support for older Office file formats, it looks like Visual Basic for Applications is also going soon. Mac Office 2008 has dropped VBA in favor of enhanced support for AppleScript, and Office 2009 is scheduled to lose it in favor of Mac incompatible Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) or Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO).
Дальше по ссылке есть [полу]официальное объяснение от Microsoft, оно еще сильнее поражает воображение:
Schwieb » Blog Archive » Saying goodbye to Visual Basic:VB on the Mac is really three parts: VBE (the editor), VBA (the execution engine) and Forms (the buildable windows and controls you edit in VBE and see when running a macro.)
VBE is pretty standard C++ code. However, the code is generally very old - it was originally designed and written several years before I came to Microsoft in 1996. [] That’s not to say the code is ‘bad,’ it was just designed and written long before current modern C++ standards.
VBA, on the other hand, is incredibly difficult to port to Intel [//они там все с ума посходили. А на какой платформе работает VBA/Windows???]
Well, VBA circa Win Office 97 (which is the closest Windows VBA to what we have on the Mac) doesn’t implement their execution engine this way at all. Instead, they have tens of thousands of lines of IA-32 assembly that directly implements all of the opcodes. That assembly does so according to the Windows Intel ABI, which is different from the Mac ABI in several important ways (the specifics of which are described here.) Also, the assembly is in MASM format which is close to but not the same as NASM as supported by GCC. So, we’d have to edit the source to be compilable by GCC, [// типа, при трудоустройстве в Microsoft умение редактировать исходники уже не является критерием профпригодности? ]
We also don’t even have the Win Office 97 Forms source code, so I was not able to compare our code to how it was implemented for Windows. [// ??? !!!! - .... 8/ Просрали все полимеры. ]
А ведь это именно VBA макросы держат корпоративных пользователей на Микрософт Офисе, и если их убрать - исчезает единственный серьезный технический аргумент против миграции. Они вообще понимают, что они делают? Или они правда просрали контроль над исходниками от офиса и теперь лихорадочно пытаются заставить работать хоть что-то?
В параллельных новостях,
Russian Underground Core/2:[30/12/2007] Проект реализации нового ядра OS/2 (ECS) перешел в фазу реализации. В качестве первого этапа мы планируем получить Assembler-ные исходники ядра полностью совпадающего с дебаговым ядром версии 104a_SMP. Далее планируется развитие и добавление новых функций.