I was just flipping through the specification and found that byte is odd. Others are short, ushort, int, uint, long, and ulong. Why this naming of sbyte and byte instead of byte and ubyte?
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I was just flipping through the specification and found that byte is odd. Others are short, ushort, int, uint, long, and ulong. Why this naming of sbyte and byte instead of byte and ubyte?
It’s a matter of semantics. When you think of a byte you usually (at least I do) think of an 8-bit value from 0-255. So that’s what
byteis. The less common interpretation of the binary data is a signed value (sbyte) of -128 to 127.With integers, it’s more intuitive to think in terms of signed values, so that’s what the basic name style represents. The
uprefix then allows access to the less common unsigned semantics.