Sort enum values, please

dsimcha dsimcha at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 25 11:58:07 PST 2009


== Quote from Tomek_Sowiñski (just at ask.me)'s article
> Quick one: could the compiler enforce that enum values in order of appearance
are sorted?
> It could neatly guarantee no surprises with case ranges, like this one:
> enum Weird { One=1, Two=4, Three=3 }
> Now, case Weird.One: .. case Weird.Three: won't match Weird.Two.
> I'd agree that you don't see enums like Weird often. Then again, why rely on a
coding convention? This guarantee looks cheap to implement.
> Any reason against?
> Tomek

Have you ever seen this issue come up in practice in a real program?  I'd be
hesitant to add even a small amount of complexity and restrictions to a language
to prevent some class of bugs that's only a theoretical possibility and almost
never occurs in real-world code.



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