How to somehow define enum type as float or double in c#

Question

It says here that the possible types for an enum are byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, or ulong.

What if I need a float or a double to define percentage increments such as 1.5 or 2.5 for example? Am I stuck?

As said here: http://en.csharp-online.net/.NET_Type_Design_Guidelines%E2%80%94Enum_Design

An enum is a structure with a set of static constants. The reason to follow this guideline is because you will get some additional compiler and reflection support if you define an enum versus manually defining a structure with static constants.

Since an enum is a set of constants, why can't I have float constants ?

Update: it is said here: http://en.csharp-online.net/.NET_Type_Design_Guidelines%E2%80%94Enum_Design "Did you know that the CLR supports enums with an underlying type of float or double even though most languages don't choose to expose it?"

Since I'm only using c# is there a way to do so with some hacks ?

Answer 1

Yes, you're stuck there. You can't use enums with floating-point types. You can use a static class with constants, however:

public static class MyFloatEnum {
    public const float One = 1.0;
    public const float OneAndAHalf = 1.5;
    // etc.
}

And it will look somewhat close in IntelliSense. Alternatively, you may just want to use constants:

public const float A = 0.5;
public const float B = 17.62;

Answer 2

Although the CLR itself supports floating point enums, C# designers chose not to expose this in the language (see http://en.csharp-online.net/.NET_Type_Design_Guidelines%E2%80%94Enum_Design). You can either use constants as in John Saunders' answer, or you can define an integer enum with multiplied values and then divide them back if/when you need the value.

The use case would be definitely interesting, though. Why do you need/want this?