about vlips & vba

The visual lisp documentation provided in Autocad reffers to VBA programming section and almost all the methods/proeprties that we access using visual lisp are found in

VBA documentation. Similary when creating variants we mention the data types such as VBString, VBInteger etc. Does this mean visual lisp uses the VBA api of

Autocad & it will be available in Autocad only as long as VBA is available for use in Autocad.

My second idea is that perhaps methods/properties (described in VBA section) actually use some objectArx code that can be accessed from various environments, and only

described in the tutorial with reference to VBA so that it can be accessed from VBA environment & so we can access it from VLISP environment also.

Which of the ideas is correct please guide.

Both VBA and VisualLisp attach to a ActiveX (COM based) API. That api is independent of VBA, so, the second idea is correct.

From what I understand these COM based servers are very effective conduits to the underlying ObjectARX, albeit somewhat cumbersome to write and maintain from AutoDesk’s point of view. The fear is that the newer AutoCAD features, which are relatively easy to expose via the .NET api, will not get the resources for proper implementation through COM. It is not likely, though, that Autodesk will abandon what is already in place.