"Timon Gehr" <timon.g...@gmx.ch> wrote in message news:jnj92m$306m$1...@digitalmars.com... > On 04/29/2012 08:35 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > >> it's just a series of manifest >> constants. The fact that they're grouped doesn't even have any semantic >> consequence, as far as I'm aware. > > The only differences are that they don't occupy their own namespace and > they don't define their own type. But non-anonymous enums are _just a > bunch of manifest constants_ as well!
No, they're not. Non-anon enums *contain* a bunch of manifest constants. But what non-anon enums *are* is a type. Anon enums are not a type at all. I think that's a significant difference. Note this is in stark contrast to: - Classes: Anonymous or not, it's still a type. - Functions: Anonymous or not, it's still *not* a type. The syntaxes we have for anon enums and non-anon enums makes them *look* like they're basically the same thing, just with/without a name, but that's not actually the case. Of course, my biggest issue by far is with the name "enum". Non-anon enums can reasonably be thought of as enumerations (except for bitfields, but I think those should be handled differently from enums anyway). But anon-enums are just plain not enumerations, period. If we weren't calling them all "enum", then I would have much, much less problem with the syntax we have. And yea, I get the whole "What's in a name?", but "enum" is just a colossally *terrible* name for this. It's worse than when "immutable" was called "invariant".
