"Matthias Schabel" <boost@schabel-family.org> wrote: Hi Matthias, Until last year I lived near research park, just above Hogel Zoo. So you're right in my old stomping grounds.
Why give an explicit integer label to any of the values (except the starting value)? It seems to me that the point of an enum declaration is to guarantee unique values for each tag, but relying on having any specific value correspond to a given tag is dangerous. I would write it like this :
enum { f_open = 0, f_input_closed, f_output_closed, f_output_buffered };
If all you want is unique values, this is fine. But in the cases I was describing (from iostreams and regex) the goal is to define a set of constants which can serve as bit flags. The easiest way to do this is for each constant to have twice the value of the previous constant -- starting at 1 instead of 0, of course ;-) Thus the proliferation of <<'s
Matthias
Jonathan
--------------------------- Matthias Schabel, Ph.D. Utah Center for Advanced Imaging Research 729 Arapeen Drive Salt Lake City, UT 84108