Mar 26, 2007 - So, what kind of polyline do you think Acad would draw? I'm runngin AutoCAD 2006 and have built an application with VBA. I would like to automate in autocad the generation of either close. In Excel and draw the PLINEs in ACAD, so I'm not sure how much of it is.
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To AutoLISP or VBA? 1 Jan, 2001 By: I hear these questions a lot. What's the difference between AutoLISP and VBA? I want to learn how to program AutoCAD, but I'm not sure which tool to learn first.
Which one is better? The quick-and-easy answer is they are both good, and you should learn both. Note that I say this is the quick answer; it is certainly not the quick solution. A more complete answer requires some time and more questions before you can make a fully informed decision. For example, do you already know BASIC?
If you do, then VBA will be the fastest one to learn. If not, then do you know any other programming languages? If you do, chances are good it will be a procedural language such as FORTRAN or PASCAL, in which case learning VBA will be pretty easy. If you don't know any programming languages at all, then AutoLISP can be easier to learn.
But it's not just your knowledge and experience in programming computers that should decide what language to learn inside AutoCAD. The next question is more difficult to answer.
What do you hope to accomplish? Each language has its strengths and weaknesses. AutoLISP is good at making new commands and creating combinations of existing commands. VBA is good at working with objects including those found in other applications such as Excel and Access from Microsoft. AutoLISP is a list processing system, which allows the programmer to store and manipulate diverse information with ease while VBA has objects that contain data and various utilities for the manipulation of complex things.
This is where the question gets sticky. It is hard to answer unless you really know both of these tools well.
But the key is to understand what you hope to accomplish and allow that to guide you towards the right solution. After a while, you will find that my quick answer is right; you will want to learn both languages.
You will want to do some things that are easier to handle in AutoLISP with just a few lines of code. While with others, you'll find that VBA will provide the easiest solution to program, such as building a complex application involving lots of dialog boxes. AutoLISP supports dialog boxes, but not to the same degree that VBA supports them. At the same time, VBA provides access to the AutoCAD system at an object level, but it does not lend itself well to using basic AutoCAD commands-something AutoLISP is able to do quite well. One thing is certain-the two languages do not work well together. That is, you can't write a utility in AutoLISP and make use of it in VBA with ease; it isn't easy to write a utility in VBA and use it inside AutoLISP either.
I'm not saying it's impossible; it just isn't easy. The bottom line is once you do start an application using one, you won't be able to switch midstream to the other to solve a problem. You will most likely have to stay with the language you selected initially. Building a Vocabulary So, let's discuss some of the differences between these two languages from a technical level. As mentioned before, AutoLISP is a wonderful tool for integrating logical constructions with traditional AutoCAD commands. You can combine AutoCAD commands into a script with conditional logic and loops to create powerful commands of your own design. These commands can be used to automate common tasks as well as solve computations in order to arrive at a result.
There are times when command-type thinking is easier to program than object-level thinking. A quick example that points this difference out clearly is the lack of a break type method in the polyline object. If you want to break a polyline, you must do the math and update the object. The same is true with the Extend and Trim commands. These commands are not available as methods for entity objects in the AutoCAD object system at this point in time.
They may appear at any time in the future, however. This is the beauty of objects!
Objects do have advantages over commands in most cases though. When you issue a command, you may or may not have the ability to select the objects you want to manipulate directly. Instead you must rely on the object selection mechanism at work in AutoCAD. Objects do not have that ambiguity. When you specify an object by reference, it is pretty clear what object you mean to manipulate.
Object-level manipulations are available in Visual LISP too. Using the (VL) extensions found in Visual LISP you can change object properties and invoke object methods when needed. You do have to use object references that can be created by converting existing entity names or by creating the objects directly. In most cases an experienced AutoLISP programmer will not need to use the objects.