Implicit enum conversions are a stupid PITA

[Ellery Newcomer]

On 03/25/2010 05:26 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Walter Bright"<newshound1 at digitalmars.com>  wrote in message
> news:hogmgm$oco$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> Ellery Newcomer wrote:
>>> I guess what I'm trying to say is it doesn't make sense that I can
>>> implicitly import FooA, an external symbol, but not bar(FooA), an
>>> external symbol defined on an external symbol which cannot be implicitly
>>> converted to a local symbol.
>>
>> And I believe it makes perfect sense! Everywhere else in the language,
>> when you define a local name it *overrides* names in other scopes, it
>> doesn't overload them.
>
> Well, the result of that is that I'm forced to make my "genEnum" library
> utility generate "enum{name of enum}ToString({name of enum} e)" instead of
> "enumToString({name of enum} e)" or else users won't be able to use it
> without a bunch of odd alias contortions that I'm not sure I can wave away
> by including them in the original mixin. (I would have just called it
> "toString", but at the time, that had been giving me some strange troubles
> so I changed it to "enumToString" instead. In retrospect, it was probably
> giving me trouble because of this very same issue.)

Suggestion: forget about enums. Implement something based on structs or 
classes a la Java, which gives you

e.toString

instead of

toString(e)

 From this conversation, I'm getting the idea that enums are more an 
antifeature than anything. And you're using mixins already anyways.