Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok
From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Getting the number of elements in an enumerated type.
Message-ID: <4111@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 29 Oct 90 02:22:28 GMT
References: <6837@castle.ed.ac.uk> <1990Oct26.154448.26698@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 27

In article <6837@castle.ed.ac.uk> elee24@castle.ed.ac.uk (H Bruce) writes:
> Can you automatically get the number of elements in an enumerated type ?
In article <1990Oct26.154448.26698@zoo.toronto.edu>, henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
: No.

Just to add to this:  it isn't clear what the question _means_.
Consider an Ada example:
	type EPNEUM is (FOO,BAZ,UGH);
	type UREY is array(EPNEUM) of CHARACTER
With these definitions,
	EPNEUM'POS(EPNEUM'LAST) + 1

	EPNEUM'POS(EPNEUM'LAST) - EPNEUM'POS(EPNEUM'FIRST) + 1
and
	UREY'SIZE / CHARACTER'SIZE
coincide (actually, I'm not 100% sure about the last), and all correspond
to the intuitive notion "number of elements in an enumerated type".

But now consider a C example:
	enum foo { a = -900, b = -87, c = -3 };
c+1 is -2, c-a+1 is -896, and neither of them is 3.  Worse still,
how about
	enum baz {a = 0, b = 0, c = 0, d = 0 };
Has this four "elements", or one?

-- 
Fear most of all to be in error.	-- Kierkegaard, quoting Socrates.