brilliant! your code worked perfect. got dates and prices.
many thanks. here is the code so others do not have to suffer with VB

use Data::Dumper;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Variant;


$blpData = Win32::OLE->new('Bloomberg.Data.1')  or die "can NOT load t
+he blpData" ;

#print $blpData->Timeout   . "\n";


$aSec  =   Variant(VT_BSTR,  "IBM Equity");
     #@tmpArray  = ("PX_Last"); 
$aFields = Variant(VT_ARRAY|VT_BSTR, 1 );
$aFields->Put(0, "PX_Last");

$sDate =   Variant(VT_DATE,  "2007/08/01");
$eDate =   Variant(VT_DATE,  "2007/08/10");

$bbData = Variant(VT_EMPTY, 1);

$bbData = $blpData->BLPGetHistoricalData($aSec,  $aFields,  $sDate, $e
+Date);

print "Error: " . Win32::OLE->LastError  . "\n";
  #print "Array Size: " , $bbData->Dim . "\n";
  #print "Returned: " . $bbData->Get(0)  . "\n";
  # print Dumper $bbData;

  for my $e (@$bbData)   {
     my $d = $e->[0];
     print "date:  $d->[0] "  .  "   Price:  $d->[1]  \n" ;
   

        #foreach $tmp (@aDim) {
        #   print $tmp
        #   
  }

print  "end"  ;
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