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c#decimalliterals

What does the M stand for in C# Decimal literal notation?

In order to work with decimal data types, I have to do this with variable initialization:

decimal aValue = 50.0M;

What does the M part stand for?

Solution

  • It means it's a decimal literal, as others have said. However, the origins are probably not those suggested elsewhere in this answer. From the C# Annotated Standard (the ECMA version, not the MS version):

    The decimal suffix is M/m since D/d was already taken by double. Although it has been suggested that M stands for money, Peter Golde recalls that M was chosen simply as the next best letter in decimal.

    A similar annotation mentions that early versions of C# included "Y" and "S" for byte and short literals respectively. They were dropped on the grounds of not being useful very often.