[AccessD] VBA Field Names - Curiosity Question

All,

In a prior life, I was sentenced to work with COBOL for over 30 years.
For the past three years, I spend my time in the world of VBA.

Since starting to work with VBA, I have been curious about something,
but have never asked about it.

In the COBOL realm (at least where I worked), we did not indicate the
field type in the field name.

Examples -
01 Part-Number   PICTURE X(30).
01 Part-Cost    Comp-3    PICTURE 9(05).


In VBA examples, I see most people using prefixes such as Str, Lng, Dat,
Etc.

I have never quite understood why people do this when working with VBA
while I believe that very few people did this in the COBOL realm.

In COBOL we would simply look at the Picture clause in the field name
definition.  This would be the equivalent of looking at the DIM
statement.

Again, this is just a curiosity question. 

Thanks,
Brad