C# 6.0 Cookbook, 4th Edition

Chapter 3. Data Types

3.0 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. Numeric types consist of a decimal type (decimal), nine integral types (byte, char, int, long, sbyte, short, uint, ulong, and ushort), and two floating-point types (float and double). Table 3-1 lists the simple types and their fully qualified names in the .NET Framework.

Table 3-1. 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 you are dealing with floating-point data types, precision can be more important than the range of the data values. The precision of the floating-point data types is listed in Table 3-2.

Table 3-2. Floating-point ...