Enum basics

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From MSDN:

An enumeration type (also named an enumeration or an enum) provides an efficient way to define a set of named integral constants that may be assigned to a variable.

Essentially, an enum is a type that only allows a set of finite options, and each option corresponds to a number. By default, those numbers are increasing in the order the values are declared, starting from zero. For example, one could declare an enum for the days of the week:

public enum Day
{
    Monday,
    Tuesday,
    Wednesday,
    Thursday,
    Friday,
    Saturday,
    Sunday
}

That enum could be used like this:

// Define variables with values corresponding to specific days
Day myFavoriteDay = Day.Friday;
Day myLeastFavoriteDay = Day.Monday;

// Get the int that corresponds to myFavoriteDay
// Friday is number 4
int myFavoriteDayIndex = (int)myFavoriteDay;

// Get the day that represents number 5
Day dayFive = (Day)5;

By default the underlying type of each element in the enum is int, but byte, sbyte, short, ushort, uint, long and ulong can be used as well. If you use a type other than int, you must specify the type using a colon after the enum name:

public enum Day : byte 
{
    // same as before 
}

The numbers after the name are now bytes instead of integers. You could get the underlying type of the enum as follows:

Enum.GetUnderlyingType(typeof(Days)));

Output:

System.Byte

Demo: .NET fiddle

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Enum:
* Enum
* Enum basics

Table Of Contents
17 Regex
19 Arrays
21 Enum
22 Tuples
24 GUID
27 Looping
36 Casting
46 Methods
88 Events
92 Structs
104 Indexer
106 Stream
107 Timers
109 Threading
127 Caching
135 Pointers
147 C# Script