Why does the following raise a compile time error: 'Cannot implicitly convert type 'int' to 'byte':

        byte a = 25;
        byte b = 60;

        byte c = a ^ b;

This would make sense if I were using an arithmentic operator because the result of a + b could be larger than can be stored in a single byte.

However applying this to the XOR operator is pointless. XOR here it a bitwise operation that can never overflow a byte.

using a cast around both operands works:

byte c = (byte)(a ^ b);