Why Stream.ReadByte return int? [duplicate]

Question

I spent some time on research System.IO namespace and after that I've found some interesting place for me. Stream class contains method with name ReadByte and definition like that:

public virtual int ReadByte()

So actually my question is why method called ReadByte and returns int? What is the purpose of naming like that?

Answer 1

ReadByte returns

The unsigned byte cast to an Int32, or -1 if at the end of the stream.

Such approach (having a special value which does not collide with any possible byte value) leads to use of a an integral type which "extends" byte.

In principle, types like short would work as well, but it is much more natural and conventional to use int.