El 26/01/2012 14:59, Trass3r escribió:
I thought it'd be good to outsource this question from the other thread
about enums as flags.
Is there any merit in having implicit conversion to the basetype?
Imo it only introduces a severe bug source and brings no advantages.
A better example is something like
if (b && Bla.S2) // written '&&' instead of '&' by mistake, will
silently pass
Heck even +,-,... work.
I kind of agree. I understand enums as a way to define "tags" or flags
used to define things like file open mode Read, Write, ReadWrite,
endianness BigEndian, LittleEndian, socket type Stream/Packet, etc.
things that under the hood are represented by integer numbers but that
don't represent *quantities*, so should not work the same way as
integers. What is the result of subtracting or multiplying LittleEndian
and BigEndian? Does not make sense. Bitwise operations would be OK
because logica tags can be combined, but little more.
And this brings the question of whether implicit casting from int to
bool is a good thing (or making any integer a valid boolean value). The
same way, true and false are not quantities and can't be used in
arithmetic. Even if they are internally represented as 1 and 0, they
should not be the same thing as numbers. IMO, Java did it better in
making them distinct. With a non-int-convertible bool your above weird
example would not work.
