COM Data Types in Scriptom

The following table summarizes the equivalent types between Scriptom and COM (VB6/VBA/.NET).

Groovy/Java	VB6/VBA	VB.NET	Comments
null	Empty/Nothing	Empty/Nothing
VariantNull	Null	???	VariantNull is not the same as Java null. Use Scriptom.NULL.
boolean	Boolean	Boolean
byte	Byte	Byte/SByte	8-bit signed or unsigned integer. 0 to 255 in the COM library. -128 to 127 in Java. Conversion happens automatically.
short	Integer	Short	16-bit signed integer. -32,768 to 32,767.
(int)	-	UShort	16-bit unsigned integer. 0 to 65,535.
int	Long	Integer	32-bit signed integer. -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647.
(long)	-	UInteger	32-bit unsigned integer. 0 to 4,294,967,295.
long	-	Long	64-bit signed integer. -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. 64-bit integers are not supported by COM in Windows Millenium or Windows 2000 and earlier.
(BigInteger)	-	ULong	64-bit unsigned integer. 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. 64-bit integers are not supported by COM in Windows Millenium or Windows 2000 and earlier.
float	Single	Single	Low-precision floating point. -3.402823E38 to -1.401298E-45 for negative values; 1.401298E-45 to 3.402823E38 for positive values.
double	Double	Double	High-precision floating point. The range of a Double is -1.79769313486231E308 to -4.94065645841247E-324 for negative values; 4.94065645841247E-324 to 1.79769313486232E308 for positive values.
BigDecimal	-	Decimal	Very high-precision fixed/floating point (128 bits), but without the large mantissa values supported by Double. Scriptom supports the Currency data type by converting to and from Decimal. The range of a Decimal is +/-79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,335 for zero-scaled numbers (that is, numbers with no decimal places). For numbers with 28 decimal places, the range is +/-7.9228162514264337593543950335. The smallest possible non-zero number is 0.0000000000000000000000000001. If the COM library uses Currency, values are limited to -922,337,203,685,477.5808 to 922,337,203,685,477.5807.
Date	Date	Date
String	String	String
SafeArray	Array	Array	Scriptom supports multi-dimensional arrays for COM.
ActiveXObject	A COM-callable object	A COM-callable object

Note that implicit type conversions are supported, so you could - for instance - pass a float to a method that expects a double. COM unsigned integer types are converted to and from the equivalent Java signed types.

CAUTION: The default floating-point type in Groovy is BigDecimal, which gets converted to a COM Decimal. Although Decimal will work in the majority of cases, type conversions involving Decimal are inefficient compared to other numeric types. It is a good idea to explicitly coerce Decimal values to type Double or type Integer, whichever makes the most sense.