Names may be qualified by other names. This can be useful when a declaration or executable statement needs to refer to a name outside of that name's scope or to a shadowed entity. A qualified name is a series of identifiers separated by periods; a name on the right side of a period is resolved in the declaration space specified by the name on the left side of the period.
The fully qualified name of an entity is a qualified name that contains the name of all containing entities. The fully qualified name of an entity is N.T
, where T
is the name of the entity and N
is the fully qualified name of its containing entity.
Because other languages may introduce entities that match keywords in the language, Visual Basic 7.0 allows keywords to be part of a qualified name as long as they follow a period. Keywords used in this way are treated as identifiers.
.
IdentifierOrKeyword