Re: Beware: Rep spec on an enumeration type causes code explosion

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Stephen says

<<I'm fairly sure that in most of the code I've written, if I supply a rep
clause for an enumeration type, I use it mainly as parameters to and
results from imported functions (Win32 comes to mind), but not as an
array index or with succ/pred. Often the results are used in case
statements. I guess this maps well to named private-type constants,
where the full type is simply an integer. However, it loses the
completeness check on case statements, which is always useful.
>>


Using case statements is reasonable, and should be reasonably efficient
if your compiler generally makes an effort to be reasonably efficient on
generting code for case statements. ertainly if the representation is
reasonbly compact (holes not too large), then the code should be efficient.