C# 3.0 Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 20. Numbers and Enumerations

20.0. Introduction

Simple types are value types that are a subset of the built-in types in C#, although, in fact, the types are defined as part of the .NET Framework Class Library (.NET FCL). Simple types are made up of several numeric types and a bool type. These numeric types consist of a decimal type (decimal), nine integral types (byte, char, int, long, sbyte, short, uint, ulong, ushort), and two floating-point types (float, double). Table 20-1 lists the simple types and their fully qualified names in the .NET Framework.

Table 20-1. The simple data types

Fully qualified name	Alias	Value range
System.Boolean	bool	true or false
System.Byte	byte	0 to 255
System.SByte	sbyte	-128 to 127
System.Char	char	0 to 65535
System.Decimal	decimal	-79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,335 to 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,335
System.Double	double	-1.79769313486232e308 to 1.79769313486232e308
System.Single	float	-3.40282347E+38 to 3.40282347E+38
System.Int16	short	-32768 to 32767
System.Uint16	ushort	0 to 65535
System.Int32	int	-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647
System.UInt32	uint	0 to 4,294,967,295
System.Int64	long	-9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807
System.UInt64	ulong	0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615

When dealing with floating point data types, precision can be can be more important than the range of the data values. The precision of the floating point data types is listed in Table 20-2.

Table 20-2. Floating point precision

Floating point type	Precision
System.Single (float)	7 digits ...