What is the Imports statement for?

[Sathyaish]

The few places I've read till now say that the Imports statement does not add any code but only facilitates the declaration of the namespace so that the programmer does not have to qualify every external method of property with the namespace qualifier.

As opposed to this, we have the C/C++/VC++ #include pre-processor directive that actually pastes code before compilation.

My question is, am I right in thinking that the #include and the Imports statement are different in their behaviour? And what does the JDK import directive do - is it like the VB.NET imports directive or is it a pre-processor directive that actually pastes external function prototypes?

[Memnoch1207]

Link 1

Link 2

MSDN Answer

[Sathyaish]

Thanks