Re: enum safety

Ian Collins wrote:

Sard wrote:
Hi,

Page 39 K&R2 says

'Although variables of enum types may be declared, compilers need not
check that what you store in such a variable is a valid value for the
enumeration'

This is why (in my opinion) enums are horribly broken in C.
Not necessarily. For example, you can have an object which can contain
a number up to 10 as numbers, and 11, 12 and 13 with special meanings. E.g.
enum rank { ACE = 1, JACK = 11, QUEEN = 12, KING = 13 };
enum rank foo = 7;
(For example mbrtowc can return a number of bytes, or 0, (size_t)(-2) and
(size_t)(-1) with special meanings. Here an enum won't do it because
constants must fit in an int, but one might have an int-returning function
with similar semantics. Maybe using negative numbers:
enum err_code { OUT_OF_MEMORY = -2, IO_ERROR = -1, MAX = INT_MAX };

--
Army1987 (Replace "NOSPAM" with "email")
.

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