Question

In DIM XNUM(10), DIM stands for? * 1 dimenstion 2 diminition 3 determination

Answer 1

Answer:

One thing to keep in mind is that, in early language development, it was common to overload a keyword to have multiple meanings. Since, in the original Basic, "Dim" was already a keyword used to declare array variables, the keyword was extended to include declaring all variables. Introducing a new keyword was avoided for multiple reasons, one of which is they didn't want to break existing programs who already used the new keyword as a variable name. Today we have more sophisticated parsing technologies and faster computers, we don't know.

For instance, in later Basic, such as Visual Basic, a type and a variable could be the same name. A great example of a keyword that was overloaded too much is "static" in C++. It means different things in different contexts. 

For those looking at the great BASIC manual @RandyMorris linked to, the first reference to DIM is on page numbered 21 or it is page 26 in the PDF itself. The more formal definition is on page numbered 37 or 41 in the PDF itself.