Re: C++ diaries...

[Olivier Henley <olivier.henley@gmail.com>]

On Friday, June 7, 2019 at 2:22:44 PM UTC-4, Keith Thompson wrote:
> The concept of enum in C++ is not what you wanted it to be.

> C's enum types are derived directly from C's.  In C, which does not
> support overloading of identifiers, enumeration constants are of type
> int.  For example:
> 
>     enum color { red, green, blue };
> 
> defined "enum color" as a discrete type, and "blue" as a constant
> equivalent to a literal 2.  C++ tightens this up slightly by making
> the constants be of the enum type (mostly, I think, to allow the
> constants to be used with overloaded functions), but they're still
> freely assignable to and from integer types.

> More recently, C++ added a new "enum class" feature which is closer to
> what you want enums to be -- but the older form goes back to the 1980s,
> and there are uncounted lines of code depending on it.

> Making C enums strongly typed from the beginning would have caused
> problems *in the environment in which the language was defined
> and used*.  Changing them in an incompatible way would have broken
> existing code.  

> Ada was designed with a different philosophy.

I know all this.

These facts do not absolve an absurd design and all the man hours it cost for decades. 

Life is short sir. I say we should struggle for better ways than accepting 'absurdly clashing identifiers' ... as a status quo of design.