Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Step by Step eBook

276 Part II Programming Fundamentals

Setting Aside Memory

When you create an array, Visual Basic sets aside room for it in memory. The following screen

shot shows conceptually how the 10-element Employees array is organized. The elements are

numbered 0 through 9 rather than 1 through 10 because array indexes always start with 0.

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

Employees

To declare a public two-dimensional array named Scoreboard that has room for two rows

and nine columns of Short integer data, you can type this statement in an event procedure

or at the top of the form:

Dim Scoreboard(1, 8) As Short

Using the syntax that emphasizes the lower (zero) bound, you can also declare the array

as follows:

Dim Scoreboard(0 To 1, 0 To 8) As Short

After you declare such a two-dimensional array and Visual Basic sets aside room for it in

memory, you can use the array in your program as if it were a table of values, as shown in

the following screen shot. (In this case, the array elements are numbered 0 through 1 and 0

through 8 .)

0

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1

Rows

Columns

Scoreboard