It’s not evil, but close if you don’t know which build-in primitive data type you need to use. When running around in C# it’s a fundamental good idea to have a grasp about what different data type you can use.
So you need you need to hold a number of 55000? Which primitive type would you use? A byte? short? who knows? Let’s take a look at the table and find the most suitable one.
| sbyte | -128 to 127 |
| byte | 0 to 255 |
| short | -32,768 to 32,767 |
| ushort | 0 to 65,535 |
| int | -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647 |
| uint | 0 to 4,294,967,295 |
| long | -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 |
| ulong | 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 |
A common mistake is unsigned vs signed. When looking at all the signed range it’s going from minus to plus the value size. When you don’t care about negative values you should use an unsigned data type like ushort.
Talking about ushort, the data type to hold the number 55000 would be most effective using the ushort type.
Further research: Integral numeric types
Other interest: list to string