Hi, In a lot of projects in the company I work for we use Ice middleware which allows to define nice interfaces for services. The IDL also allows to define enums, but I cannot set specific values for the enum items. We also need to store some of these values in databases. We use int to represent the enumerations. Since we might feel the need to add more items to an enum or delete an unused one, we cannot just cast enum to int and vice versa when writing to or reading from the database. We need methods that translate enum to int and back in a stable way that won't change for an individual enum item, even if its position in the enum changes. I found a way to do this, which provides enum<->int and enum<->string. It is used like this: typedef enum { Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon } Greek; CREATE_CONVERTER_METHODS(Greek, (Alpha, 5), (Beta, 3), (Gamma, 7), (Delta, 1), (Epsilon, 6)); std::cout << GreekToString(IntToGreek(1)) << std::endl; std::cout << GreekToString(IntToGreek(6)) << std::endl; std::cout << GreekToInt(Alpha) << std::endl; std::cout << GreekToString(Alpha) << std::endl; std::cout << IntToGreek(17) << std::endl; ------ $ ./a.out Delta Epsilon 5 Alpha terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::invalid_argument' what(): unexpected Greek value My questions are: a) Is this something that might be interesting for others as well? (Or does boost even offer something like that already?) b) I'd really like to be able to write this instead: CREATE_CONVERTER_METHODS(Greek, Alpha = 5, Beta = 3, Gamma = 7, Delta = 1, Epsilon = 6); Obviously, if I could use the preprocessor to translate Alpha = 5 -> (Alpha, 5) I'd be done. But I have no idea how to do that. Any suggestions? Thanks and regards, Roland