This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.
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1.3 Statement of principles
The design of Visual Basic 7.0 encompasses the following principles, in relative order of importance:
- Visual Basic 7.0 is recognizable as the descendent of previous versions of Visual Basic, and an existing Visual Basic programmer will feel an immediate familiarity with the language.
- Visual Basic 7.0 syntax and semantics are simple, straightforward and easy to understand. The language avoids features that cause unexpected behavior.
- Visual Basic 7.0 allows developers to take advantage of the major features of the NGWS Frameworks and Runtime and is consistent with the its conventions.
- Visual Basic 7.0 is reasonably "upgradeable" from previous versions of Visual Basic. That is, it is possible in a significant number of cases to take existing Visual Basic code and, with a well-defined set of transformations, produce a working Visual Basic 7.0 program.
- Because the NGWS Runtime is explicitly designed to support multiple computer languages, Visual Basic 7.0 is designed to work well in a multi-language environment.
- Visual Basic 7.0 is as compatible with previous versions of Visual Basic as possible. Whenever practical, Visual Basic 7.0 has the same syntax, the same semantics and the same runtime behavior as its predecessors.
These principles complement the original design principles of Visual Basic. For the purpose of completeness those principles were:
- Visual Basic is designed to be as safe a language to write in as possible. In general, Visual Basic tries to balance reliability, ease of use, and efficiency in the definition of the language.
- Visual Basic is designed to be extremely approachable. A reasonable understanding of the language should be attainable by a large portion of computer users and ease of use is significant.
- Visual Basic is designed to enable rapid program development, while not compromising reliability.
- Visual Basic code is predictable and efficient.
- Visual Basic may be used either as a strongly typed language, or as a loosely typed language. This enables rapid development in the latter case, better correctness of user code in the former.