Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!convex!killer!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!necntc!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: enums
Message-ID: <5696@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: 1 Aug 88 17:32:15 GMT
References: <1608@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <469@m3.mfci.UUCP> <1988Jul22.171612.6225@utzoo.uucp> <5447@ihlpf.ATT.COM> <11686@steinmetz.ge.com> <2404@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 16

In <2404@boulder.Colorado.EDU> swarbric@tramp (Frank Swarbrick) writes:
>In <11686@steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>>[enums should be in sequence, so ++ and -- can be used meaningfully]
>
>Personally, I would like it to be even a little more like Pascal.  [++ on the
>last item should wrap to the first.]  This is like Pascal's succ() and pred()

I rather doubt that this is true of Pascal -- I've never heard of it before --
but I don't claim to be a Pascal expert, and anyway it doesn't affect my
reply.  I *don't* think it should be true of C, because it violates the
principle of keeping the primitives simple.  Most applications don't need the
wraparound behavior, and it does have a nontrivial cost, therefore the ++
operator should simply step by one (with undefined behavior if you step off
the end).

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint