Tips for golfing in Visual Basic

Question

This page is not for Visual Basic .NET Tips or VBA tips

Visual Basic (VB or VB6) is an object-oriented and event-driven dialect of basic that was developed and released by Microsoft in 1991. The last release of Visual Basic came as Visual Basic 6.0 in 1998, and the language was declared a legacy language in 2008. Visual Basic .NET replaced Visual Basic in 2002.

All answers on this site that are written in Visual Basic are assumed to be written for Visual Basic 6.0 unless otherwise stated.

Some helpful links

• MSDN Visual Basic 6.0 Resource Center

• Visual Basic Wiki

You may compile and execute Visual Basic code using Visual Studio Community.

There is no online resource for compiling VB code.

Answer 1

Use DefXXX statements when declaring multiple variables

The statement

DefDbl A-D

Defines all variables that start with A through D as being of the type Double, which means this can shorten cases such as

Dim A As Double
Dim B As Double
Dim C As Double
Dim D As Double

Similar commands exist for the following types

DefBool     ''  Boolean
DefByte     ''  byte
DefCur      ''  Currency
DefDate     ''  Date
DefDbl      ''  Double
DefDec      ''  Decimal
DefInt      ''  Integer
DefLng      ''  Long
DefObj      ''  Object
DefSng      ''  Single
DefStr      ''  String
DefVar      ''  Variant

Answer 2

Use Console.Write over Console.WriteLine

There is quite a large amount of overhead code necessary to get a snippet of code to execute in VB, and by default this overhead is configured to take up quite a large amount of bytes - for instance

Module M
Sub Main
Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!")
End Sub
End Module

May be golfed down by 4 bytes by the Console.Write(...) command over Console.WriteLine(...).

Module M
Sub Main
Console.Write("Hello, World!")
End Sub
End Module