> The Excel VBA environment is quite nice to work in -
> especially if you have two screens on your computer.
You can say that as many times as you like... and I will agree with
you every one.

> I've never done any specific comparisons between VBA and
> fully-compiled languages, but I would expect a proper
> executable would probably run at least 10 times faster  than
> a semi-compiled language, and 100 times faster than a
> fully-interpreted language,
Depends on the optimisation sometimes.
I've seen optimisation actually increase the executable times over
interpreted languages.. especially those.. like VB... that have been
through the mill and are pretty much optimised themselves. I'm not
decrying that binaries genearally are faster... I'm saying that people
have worked so much on getting it right in some interpreted languages
that the times may be closer than you think... especially because that
work hasn't generally gone into the assembler that is generated.

It's sobering to see the amount of assembler generated by a "visual"
"compiled language" compared with what an assembler programmer can
achieve.

> I haven't tried to call externally-compiled computation
> modules from Excel, but it should certainly be possible,
> although cumbersome. Don't worry about it until you need it.
Neither have I though I look with jealosy on some that I know who have
managed to create DLLs of their code to share.