Re: Printing Enum Variable Re: Linux World

["Mike Silva" <mjsilva@jps.net>]

Michael Young wrote in message <7c4ru6$e45$1@remarQ.com>...
<...>
>I view these as design issues, not really coding problems. Who wants to
know
>what color the traffic light is, and why? My first guess is that a state
>machine is a more appropriate abstraction.

But enumerations (in whatever language) are ideal for representing these
states.

>Likewise for your co-workers'
>political views: these might be better captured as polymorphic behaviors.

Possibly, but at some point somebody is going to want to identify those
views (e.g. to get each person on the right mailing list), and again
enumerations are ideal.  In addition, you can do things like defining an
array of Political_Slate records over the enumeration, which is a very clean
and close match to the actual situation.

> With
>that said, there is no getting around the neutral nature of storage media.
>From now until some enlightened future, these attributes will likely be
stored
>as coded numeric values in databases. This will always be a weak link,
since
>somebody outside the development staff can change the coding to your
>detriment.

I don't understand this.  If somebody can break your data encoding spec
after the fact then there's no end to your troubles.

I like enumerations, but I don't see the appropriateness of enumerations as
an Ada vs. C++ issue.  I use them whereever I can in both languages.  I *do*
enjoy the extra Ada attribute support (constructs such as
  for index in Political_Spectrum'Range loop
are pleasingly elegant, IMHO).  In fact I find Ada attributes in general
quite nice.

Mike