What does DIM stand for in Visual Basic and BASIC?

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Nick Katsivelos picture Nick Katsivelos · Jun 23, 2009 · Viewed 203.1k times · Source

What does DIM stand for in Visual Basic?

Answer

Patrick McDonald picture Patrick McDonald · Jun 23, 2009

Dim originally (in BASIC) stood for Dimension, as it was used to define the dimensions of an array.

(The original implementation of BASIC was Dartmouth BASIC, which descended from FORTRAN, where DIMENSION is spelled out.)

Nowadays, Dim is used to define any variable, not just arrays, so its meaning is not intuitive anymore.

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