A few nuances about the primitive types in .Net which are not so obvious: If you add two short s you will get int . The same with byte s. Arithmetic operators for these types are not implemented in .Net therefore the values are implicitly converted to int before calculation. short x = 2, y = 2; var z = x + y; Console.WriteLine(z.GetType()); //output: System.Int32 Chuck Norris is not the only person who can divide by zero. Every .Net developer can do this. Just use floating point numbers. var z = 1.0 / 0; Console.WriteLine(z); //output: Infinity