Why we can't have “char” enum types

Question

I want to know why we can\'t have \"char\" as underlying enum type. As we have byte,sbyte,int,uint,long,ulong,short,ushort as underlying enum type. Second what is the defau

Answer 1

Technically, you can't do this. But, you can convert the enum to a byte and then convert that to char. This is useful if your goal is to have something like this (realizing this is impossible to do:

public enum CharEnum
{
    one = '1'
}

You can do this, however, by using ASCII byte values and then converting:

public enum CharEnum
{
    one = 49,
    two = 50
}

You can then convert to byte and to char to get the char value. It is not really pretty, but it will work, if getting a char is your ultimate goal. You can also use unicode and an int value, if you need chars outside of the ASCII range. :-)