Prefixes suffixes still seem to apply in VB today as a hangover from those
"former years"... Hehehe.

A lot of functions have a dual result... Left(....) returns a variant of
type string  while Left$(...) returns a string.

As has been noted here beforer though, these "retro" functions are going to
disseapear in the future, one of the reasons probably being to bring
applications more in line with one another. Soooo... Using Left(...) instead
of Left$(...) along with other $[Function] functions, will probably make
your applications slightly more future proof.