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From: alex@umbc3.UMD.EDU (Alex S. Crain)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Enum vs Define
Message-ID: <447@umbc3.UMD.EDU>
Date: Thu, 30-Jul-87 23:11:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: umbc3.447
Posted: Thu Jul 30 23:11:27 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 15:07:52 EDT
References: <19913@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: alex@umbc3 (Alex S. Crain)
Organization: University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Lines: 30

>One hard won bit of knowledge for me is how the difference between
>enums and defines can screw you up:
>
>in :
>       enum {
>                ERRMSGA = 1,
>                ERRMSGB = 2
>                };
> ERRMSGA is defined to be a subtype of the smallest type that will
>hold any of these enums. Since none of these enums are very large,
>you'd expect:

    No, wait stop, enough. I like C. I find it gives me lots of freedom to
work in and I believe that it is my responsibility as a programmer to write
readable, maintainable code. if i felt that i needed the language to do it
for me, i would use pascal or ada. 

    Anyone who doesn't feel comfortable with an untyped language but for some 
reason must use C has my sympathies, but this is really getting out of hand.
I remember reading somewhere that there is not a 'complete' ada compiler in 
existance because no-one can afford the disk space...this is why. the team
that i work on has agreed among ourselves not to use enum, not to #define
char int as 'byte', not to define { as begin and not to use TRUE as 1. we
leave that to the guys upstairs using turbo-pascal.

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