What is the reason for not instantiating an object at the time of declaration?

Question

I had to delve into some VB6 code recently and I saw this pattern all over the place:

dim o as obj
set o = new obj

Why not this?

Answer 1

Here's another caveat:

For x = 1 to 100
   dim obj as new MyObject

   'Do something with obj
Next

You might expect that a new object is instantiated 100 times, but you'll find that it only gets instantiated the very first time. This one caught me off guard long ago.

I still use this notation all the time though. Just make sure you know the behavior.