14.15 Constant expressions

A constant-expression is an expression that can be fully evaluated at
compile-time.
constant-expression:
expression
The type of a constant expression can be one of the following: sbyte, byte,
short, ushort, int, uint,
long, ulong, char, float, double, decimal, bool, string, any enumeration
type, or the null type.
The following constructs are permitted in constant expressions:
?Literals (including the null literal).
?References to const members of class and struct types.
?References to members of enumeration types.
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?Parenthesized sub-expressions, which are themselves constant expressions.
?Cast expressions, provided the target type is one of the types listed
above.
?The predefined +, -, !, and ~ unary operators.
?The predefined +, -, *, /, %, <<, >>, &, |, ^, &&, ||, ==, !=, <, >, <=,
and >= binary operators, provided
each operand is of a type listed above.
?The ?: conditional operator.
Whenever an expression is of one of the types listed above and contains
only the constructs listed above, the
expression is evaluated at compile-time. This is true even if the
expression is a sub-expression of a larger
expression that contains non-constant constructs.
The compile-time evaluation of constant expressions uses the same rules as
run-time evaluation of nonconstant
expressions, except that where run-time evaluation would have thrown an
exception, compile-time
evaluation causes a compile-time error to occur.
Unless a constant expression is explicitly placed in an unchecked context,
overflows that occur in integraltype
arithmetic operations and conversions during the compile-time evaluation of
the expression always
cause compile-time errors (?4.5.12).
Constant expressions occur in the contexts listed below. In these contexts,
a compile-time error occurs if an
expression cannot be fully evaluated at compile-time.
?Constant declarations (?7.3).
?Enumeration member declarations (?1.30).
?case labels of a switch statement (?5.7.2).
?goto case statements (?5.9.3).
?Dimension lengths in an array creation expression (?4.5.10.2) that
includes an initializer.
?Attributes (?4).
An implicit constant expression conversion (?3.1.6) permits a constant
expression of type int to be
converted to sbyte, byte, short, ushort, uint, or ulong, provided the value
of the constant expression
is within the range of the destination type.