dhenry:
No language (or any tool, for that matter) can do everything effectively and efficiently to everyone's satisfaction - that's why we have so many different langues / tools.Judging a language's "inferiority" on its inability to perform a task is futile.
That was meant as a personal remark as in I'm happy not to be coding in this language any more. You are right, most modern languages have their place even if they had some peculiar perks that look weird if you moved from another language. One has to learn to pick the right tool for the task at hand. It's just that we didn't have much of choice in the product back then, so I grew frustrated when I learned the tool wasn't really fitting the tasks and as a result I got bugs to fix.
VB String class apparently handles character data in 64K blocks and this can result in exponential growth in execution time if you go over the bound. You can work around this too but for handling of very large text files, VB is not good at all.
Another thing that can bother a C coder. Basic interpreter evaluates all the conditions in a clause while C quits evaluating if the following conditions couldn't change the result.
I still think the language, at least VB6, is more or less broken, call that a judgement or not. However, Microsoft has later added operators like OrElse and AndAlso into later VB versions to cover the conditional operator topic. I'm sure VB as language has progressed in other topics too. I'm not this familiar with non-VB Basic interpreters.