Question

There is the following in some code I’m trying to figure out:

For I& = 1 To...

I’m not familiar with the & after a variable. What does that represent?

After some further research, it looks like the I& is being defined as a type LONG. Now my questions is why would they be doing this? Is it overkill or just legacy code?

Answer 1

You are right – putting an ampersand & after a number or a variable means that it is of a Long 32-bits type.

So the answer is, how many iterations does the loop need – is it possible, that it would exceed 16 bits integer?

With no data type identifier after the i, it is implied to be of the native Integer (the default). Therefore this i is expressed as an Integer, which makes it a 16-bit i.

So, I’d say it is the original developer had this habit of explicitly stating the variable type with &, and whether it was really needed there depends on the number of iterations that the For..Next loop has to support in this case.