Design of reflective enums

[Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)]

renoX wrote:
> Hello,
> Kevin Bealer has started an implementation (two implementations in fact!) of reflective enums, and I wanted to discuss the use case and the design of this feature to make it as useful as possible.
> Reflective enums have two useful properties that don't have normal enums:
> - their label is printable
> - it's possible to do a foreach on all the possible values.
> 
> In my opinion, for the reflective enums, the following constraint should apply:
> - they should 'look like' normal enums as much as possible.

Why? There is so much more freedom now, why limit ourselves. I think 
enums of arbitrary types should be allowed, including arrays, hashes, 
and user-defined types.

An enumerated type is nothing but a closed set of named values. The 
names are always strings; the values can be of any (uniform) type.


Andrei