# Visual Basic > Slow Chat with the Microsoft Visual Basic team >  Dim

## masfenix

hey guys, really excited to be here. When does a 18 year old highschool student get to talk to his favourite coding language developers  :Smilie: /

anyways, one question i've had for a long time is what in the blue sky does "DIM" stand for ?

he two famous answers ive heard are dimension, and declare in memory?.

thanks

also, as a student in science (bio, physics), programming is just a hobby so im still at a beginner to intermediate level I'd say.

I was also wondering how a programming language is created? do you use c++ to create vb?  like i just cant picture it in my head  :Smilie:

----------


## PaulYuk_MS

Great question!

Dim is definitely rooted from Dimension.  In much older versions of basic you would use Dim to create an array in memory.  At some point (we're not exactly sure when) this was extended to a broader set of variable types.  I'll ask some people around the company to see if we can track it back to the very beginning.

----------


## RobDog888

Hey Paul  :Smilie: 

I vaugly remember back with extended basic (BASICA) we used Dim but I think it was only with arrays. For strng variables it was just ...

FirstName$ = ""

to initialize/declare a variable. So maybe it was sometime when BASICA turned into Visual Basic that the dimensioning changed?


*Edit: 48,000 Posts!*  :Big Grin:

----------


## PaulYuk_MS

Yes, I definitely remember it there, in QBasic, TrueBasic, and GWBasic (I think) -- again for arrays.  

There are some people here who worked on VBv1 -- hopefully they can shed some light.

----------

