enum value vs. immutable

Sergei Nosov sergei.nosov at gmail.com
Sun Dec 1 23:31:55 PST 2013


On Monday, 2 December 2013 at 05:57:33 UTC, CJS wrote:
> I was reading the enum page of Ali Çehreli's (excellent) D book 
> (http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/enum.html), and I'm confused by an 
> enum value (not enum type), such as
>    enum secondsPerDay = 60 * 60 * 24;
> In that situation I would have used an immutable variable. Is 
> there any reason to prefer enum vs. immutable when defining 
> constants?

enum is a compile-time constant and an immutable variable is not.

As an example, in order to create a enum variable you have to 
know it's value at compile time, e.g. you can't read it from 
file. On the contrary, you can read a string from file and string 
is the same thing as immutable(char) in D.


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