Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!umd5!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: enums
Message-ID: <8266@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 29 Jul 88 07:32:36 GMT
References: <1608@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <469@m3.mfci.UUCP> <1988Jul22.171612.6225@utzoo.uucp> <5447@ihlpf.ATT.COM> <31416@cca.CCA.COM>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <31416@cca.CCA.COM> alex@CCA.CCA.COM (Alexis Layton) writes:
>To jump into this fray, I think I'd have to agree with Henry.  Enums are
>completely superfluous if they do not provide both type-checking and better
>storage control.

No; they can materially aid in debugging.  This was impressed on me
earlier this week when I ran "dmdebug" in my terminal to track down
an obsucre problem I was having with "sam"'s terminal part.  Rob had
written "sam" using enums where most of us would have used #defined
manifest constant symbols.  Because this tied a name to the numeric
value, the debugger was able to show the symbolic names of the
constants.  That was very helpful..