In pre-.NET Visual Basic, a programmer could declare a string to be a certain width. For example, I know that a social-security number (in the US) is always eleven characters. So, I can declare a string that would store social-security numbers as an eleven-character string like this:

```
Dim SSN As String * 11

```

My question is: does this create any type of performance benefit that would either make the code run faster or perhaps use less memory? Also, would a fixed-length string be allocated in memory differently (*i.e.*: on the stack as opposed to in the heap)?