About a week ago, I generalized Better Enums somewhat to accept non-integral underlying types, with some conditions and restrictions. I’d like to ask for comments/opinions/ideas on this feature. I made a little write-up on it [1], but I will summarize here as well. The write-up is a superset of the content of this message, so don’t read the message if you click the link :) If you have a literal type “foo”, you can do: ENUM(SomeEnum, foo, A, B = 2, C = foo(…)) SomeEnum value = SomeEnum::A; switch(value) { case SomeEnum::A: // … case SomeEnum::B: // … case SomeEnum::C: // ... } The switch above can have its cases checked for exhaustiveness by the compiler. Also, “value” above behaves like a “container” for one value of type foo, whose members can be accessed using operator ->. So, basically, you can have enumerated, reasonably type-safe sets of arbitrary literal types. The catch is that you have to provide an invertible mapping from foo into some underlying integral type, which mapping is declared either by equipping foo with the right constructor and conversion operator, or specializing a traits template. I would love to make a default implementation for this mapping, but it seems like I need to achieve the effect of a reinterpret_cast at compile time, and I haven’t been able to do so. [1]: http://aantron.github.io/better-enums/GeneralUnderlyingTypes.html