The day came when I met Infinity. She was from the central resistance base, called 'Wonderland'. Every month, Ritchie had been sending the 10 best programmers from his base to Wonderland, for participation in the Rust project. 
"Wait!" - I realised I had just said 'best programmers'. "Does this mean that I'm one of the top 10 best programmers that Ritchie has?! Cool!" - I hadn't even thought about that until now. 
"Are you listening to me Teo?" Infinity stopped my thoughts, asking a question. 
"Sure, sorry... please continue," I replied. 
"This is gonna be hard. You'll be in the central base with the best programmers we have. Your mission in the Rust project will be top secret; you will not be able to talk about it to your friends." 
Friends? She said 

 ?! Does she know that I have literally nobody on my own here?! That I'm completely alone?! That my best friend is a machine that I still don't trust?! She must be kidding! 
"I looked through your code Teo... And I was surprised at how quickly you've improved! Take your first and last programs for example; this is astonishing! But at the same time, I've realized that whoever was training you, is only choosing data types that match each other. You have never used the 

 technique." 
"Type conversion?!" I hadn't heard of that before. 
"Let's take some time Teo, and I'll go through this topic with you right now." she replied.

Infinity began, "Here is a table of built-in types in C#. Some of them you already know, but others could be new for you":

"Wow! Do C# programmers remember all these types, their sizes and ranges off by heart?!" I wondered. 
"Most of them... not. What you need to know, is when to use each of those." 
"Yeah, for example, 

 - they're almost the same, so why can't I just use 

 all the time?" I naively asked. 
"Well... you can! It depends on the constraints that you have. If you have 50 000 small integers that you need to send over the network, then a 

 array, as it will save memory space and increase the speed." she explained. 
"For now, let's make a deal, that if you have no special requirements for the task, then 

" 
"OK, I will do. I've already been doing this so far..." I replied, "Wait - can you please tell me, what does that 'u' mean at the beginning of some of the types?" 
"

. If you look carefully, you'll notice that types that start with 

, do not have negative values. In general, you can use 

 in a very similar way - look at this code example and solve the task after it": 

in C# every variable has a type. It's impossible to change the type of a variable, but you can convert a value from one type to another and then store it into a new variable.

Implicit conversions happen without us as programmers even noticing it

! Here is an example of implicit type conversion": 


. Everything is fine; implicit conversion happens, and you store the value from a variable of one type, into a variable of another one." Infinity explained. 
"This is a bit confusing!" I exclaimed. "How would I know that implicit conversion between two types exists?" 
"Good question Teo! There is a general rule: 

implicit conversion exists from 'small' types, to 'bigger' ones, counted by the number of bytes the type takes

 For example, there is an implicit conversion from 

 ." 
"It makes some sense now... So, if inside an 

 variable, I have a big number - let's say 1000, and I try to store it inside a 

 variable, it won't fit into the range [0-255]?" I shared my thoughts. 
"Yes, that's exactly the reason Teo. If I have an 

 that takes 4 bytes, it's impossible to fit it into a 

 type that is only 1 byte big. Here is a complete 

, or you can just use a subset that I've picked for you":

I started to like her. She was smart, wasn't aggressive and explained things really well. Perhaps I wouldn't be so disappointed about working with her if I had no backup plan (like returning home with Noname's help). 
"Good job Teo! There is one more type of conversion technique — 

A cast is a way of explicitly informing the compiler that you 

 to make the type conversion, and that you are aware that data loss may occur. To perform a cast, specify the type that you are casting to in parentheses(), in front of the value or variable to be converted.

"This looks powerful!" I proclaimed. "Could you please show me some more cast examples?" 
"No problem, here you go! Oh, and don't forget about the exercise after below the example!":

"So, take this very simple task. You have some cupcakes and some people that all want one! You need to share among people fairly, so that everyone gets an equal amount of cupcakes. Your program should read an 

 (amount of people). Then, it should output "Every person should get {amount} cupcakes" 
"This seems simple; you just need to divide 2 numbers... do you want me to write the code?" I asked. 
"Go ahead!" she said, a little too positively. 
It was clear that something wasn't quite right. She was smiling and staring straight at me. 
"But... I'll write the code." I uneasily thought to myself. 

"Okay, let's run this code with 3 people and 6 cupcakes" she said. 
The code ran fine; the result was - "Every person should get 2 cupcakes" 
She continued, "But, what if we have only 1 cupcake and 4 people?" 
When we tried my code with these parameters, the output was - "Every person should get 0 cupcakes" 
"Why is it 0? It should be a quarter (0.25) of a cupcake for everyone!" I firmly yelled, frustrated. 

"Well, it's because of the type conversion. 

When you perform an arithmetic operation with integers, you'll always get an integer as a result. This works for

and all other primitive types that we've used.

"What does this mean Infinity?!" I asked. 
"This means, that you should be careful when dividing 

 types. C# compiler isn't able to understand that you want a 

 as a result, unless you specifically tell it this. Otherwise, 

"As you'll see Teo, there are a lot of ways to cast types. The main rule here is ' 

if there are several operands in the expression, then the type of the result is the largest of the operand types'.

 . In tasks that you are going to solve in the future, make sure you don't forget to cast to 

 division. If you forget, you'll lose the fractional part, just like in the cupcakes example!"

Proper usage of c# implicit conversion and explicit type conversions will help to convert between variable's type.