Enum literals, good? bad? what do you think?

[russhy]

On Wednesday, 21 July 2021 at 13:36:37 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 7/20/21 11:50 AM, russhy wrote:
>> Hello
>> 
>> I all the time wondered why we always have to be so much 
>> verbose with enum, when it's not casting to primitives, it is 
>> about repeating their long type name, constantly, all the time
>> 
>> After trying some other languages over the past few years, i 
>> discovered in zig you can just ommit the enum type name and 
>> just use enums this way: .MY_VALUE
>> 
>> I don't know if that's something that could be supported with 
>> D, i am not a compiler dude, so i don't have the answer
>> 
>> Adam on discord mentioned using with(ENUM_TYPE) or just an 
>> alias, but i think we go ahead and make it simple
>> 
>> I had prepared a DIP [1], not ready at all, but i wanted to 
>> initiate some discussion about that feature
>> 
>> So what do you think? yay? nay? why not?
>> 
>> 
>> [1] https://github.com/RUSshy/DIPs/blob/patch-2/DIPs/DIP1xxx.md
>
> I enjoy having this type of shortcut in Swift, and wish D had 
> something similar.
>
> To give some perspective, look no further than configuration 
> options of std.algorithm:
>
> ```d
> arr.sort!("a < b", .unstable); // instead of 
> SwapStrategy.unstable
> ```
>
> Clear as the original, and less verbose. In Swift, enums are 
> used extensively, and I don't think they would be if the 
> shortcut syntax wasn't available.
>
> And in general, any function parameter enums are cumbersome to 
> write in D.
>
> However, using `.enumMember` isn't viable as noted by several 
> people.
>
> If I were to propose something, it would be to have a short 
> substitute for the type. Something like `#.typeMember` which 
> then uses the expression type to lookup the member. Then you 
> can do things like `#.init` or any other type properties that 
> return an instance of the type. It wouldn't be a panacea 
> though, since overloading would make this ambiguous. But 
> assignment/initialization would be unambiguous.
>
> Probably not going to fly in D.
>
> -Steve
of course the . syntax isn't final, the point of the DIP 
discussion was to discuss about the ability to omit the enum type 
name, the syntax can always be something else