On Thursday, 17 September 2020 at 13:13:46 UTC, Simen Kjærås
wrote:
To quote Bill Baxter from way back when
(https://forum.dlang.org/post/fjdc4c$2gft$1...@digitalmars.com):
> Why does:
> final int x = 3;
> make any more intuitive sense than:
> enum int x = 3;
> ?
There are these things called "words". And they have
"meanings"...
enum: (short for "enumeration", the noun form of "enumerate")
"to specify one after another : list"
final:
"not to be altered or undone <all sales are final>"
To be clear: I don't mind 'enum' being used this way, but if I
were to do things over again, I would have used 'alias'.
Well, I was already using anonymous enums for compile-time
constants anyway. For example, when translating C headers with
lots of #defined constants (OpenGL is the poster child), I was
doing this in Derelict:
enum {
GL_THIS = ...,
GL_THAT = ...,
}
So enum for this has always made sense to me. I would have been
fine with final, but it would have been a leap for me because of
my Java background; I would have kept seeing it as a synonym for
const. And I would never have liked the Alias approach.
But no matter what solution would have been implemented (final,
Alias, new keyword), I would have looked it up then, put my head
down and gotten right back to writing code. It just happens the
one that's most intuitive to me was picked :-)
