enum's... convinient, but used too often?

[zanza]

enum's are very nice, they make organizing and indexing into complicated arrays painless, and they make the code a little more logical for other readers.

but what im curious about is: what would any of you say would be considered using too many enumerators?

žÅNžÅ

 

[xwb]

Normally it is the case of not enough enums and too many #defines. I've actually run out of space for #defines on two projects: one on RMX and one on Windows but I've never run out of space on enums yet. Mind you - they were fairly big projects in the late-80s early-90s when 4Mb was a lot of memory.

 

[zanza]

well thats good to hear.

ive started a project in which i already have three enums that average 12 symbols. its so much easier with them, but you know what they say about too much of a good thing.

*shrug*

thanks for your reply.

žÅNžÅ

 

[xwb]

What you really need is a naming convention of some sort so that you know it is an enum and from which set. It is more convenient to have

enum dirn { north, south, east, west };
enum posn ( top, bottom, left, right };

than

enum Dirn { DirnNorth, DirnSouth, DirnEast, DirnWest, DirnMax };
enum Posn { PosnTop, PosnBottom, PosnLeft, PosnRight, PosnMax };

but the latter has benefits - you know it is Dirn or Posn. I always have a Max so I can use it in loops and arrays. I always find enums better than #defines because I can see what they are in the debugger. Problem is getting too comfortable with enums and then having to go to a language like Java which doesn't have them (doesn't have #defines either). You have to think really hard about how to code something.