An enum is the simplest form of custom operands — a way to group and name related constants as a value type.

You can achieve the same thing with a static class with const fields, but an enum has the added benefit of being type safe.

Defining an enum

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

Behind the scenes, enums are encoded as ints or bytes, starting from 0 and counting up (i.e. Monday = 0, Tuesday = 1). But this can be explicitly set by the programmer.

public enum Day
{
	Monday = 1;
	Tuesday = 2;
	Wednesday = 3;
	Thursday = 4;
	Friday = 5;
	Saturday = 6;
	Sunday = 0;
}

Using an enum

As with any type, you use enums to create variables.

Day x = Day.Monday;