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

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

From C# specifications:

var f = 0f; // float var d = 0d; // double var m = 0m; // decimal (money) var u = 0u; // unsigned int var l = 0l; // long var ul = 0ul; // unsigned long 

Note that you can use an uppercase or lowercase notation.