Lesson 39: Numeric Data

Like other programming languages, VB is picky about data so you must go along with VB's data requirements. Before you work with a data value, your must tell VB exactly what type of data it is.

This lesson deals with numeric data. When writing programs, numbers are just not numbers! All numeric data falls into one of two categories:

• integers - whole numbers without decimal points such as 756, 0 and -1298. Integers can represent ages, counts, years and so on.
• decimals - numbers with decimal points that can represent fractional values such as 7.768, 0.06 and -398.67. Decimals are sometimes referred to as floating point numbers.

When writing programs, you must keep in mind that you want the program to run as efficiently as possible. Efficiency, in computer terms, boils down to CPU and RAM usage: you do not want to place too much of a burden on either. Some data types consume a lot of memory and are inefficient, whereas others consume less memory and compute more quickly.

Here are the seven numeric data types that can be used in VB. This chart also outlines how much memory storage (bytes) each data type occupies.