Chapter 3. Fundamental Types

All information stored or used by a Visual Basic .NET program has a type. A type describes a piece of information to the .NET Framework, saying how it is used and stored. By assigning every piece of information a type, the language can enforce type-safe programming , which ensures that information is always interpreted in a correct manner, helping to reduce programming errors.

There are 11 fundamental types in Visual Basic .NET. All the fundamental types support literals , which are a textual representation of a particular value of a fundamental type. For example, the string 10.5 is a Double literal that represents the decimal value 10.5. The fundamental types are listed in Table 3-1.

Among the 11 fundamental types are seven numeric types. These numeric types split into three categories: integers of varying ranges ( Byte , Short , Integer , and Long ), floating-point numbers of varying ranges and precision ( Single and Double ), and a decimal number with a fixed range and precision ( Decimal ).