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 ...

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