> I know some people don't like using mixins, but I think that's really the best way to achieve that effect without loosing DIY and without resorting to something more heavy-weight > ... > That just gave me an idea: I think you should be able to get away with an ordinary union
I thought about those, but ultimately, the problem is that they're not extensible: if a new type of access mask is introduced. In the former case, I can't AND it with a generic access mask to test what the result is, because they're of different types; in the latter case, there's no way to extend this whatsoever. :\ I'm trying to keep this extensible while avoiding code duplication, and it's proven to be surprisingly hard to do this neatly.
