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The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

  ◄Scoping Rules►   ◄Scope of Variables and Constants►   ◄Contents►   ◄Index►
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Scope of Variables and Constants
 
Any time a variable appears in program text, BASIC follows a set of rules
to determine which object is referred to by the variable. These rules
describe a variable's scope--the range of statements over which the
variable is defined.
 
You may think of variables and constants as having one of two scopes: global
or local.
 
  ■ Global variables, once declared, may be used anywhere in a module
    to refer to some single object.
  ■ Local variables are local to some part of the module (that is, the
    module-level code or one of the procedures).
 
In addition, variables can be shared in such a way that they aren't quite
global, nor are they completely local. This is done by using the SHARED
statement.