SteveX Compiled

This is good news for C++:  Herb Sutter reports that in July the ISO C++ committee voted better enum support into the language. 

It’s all good, but the part that’s affected me in the past is the scoping of enum values.  Previously:

1	<p>class MyClass<br>{<br>&nbsp; enum&nbsp;BorderColor { Red, Green, Blue };<br>};</p>

The values Red, Green, and Blue were scoped to MyClass, not to BorderColor.  So you couldn’t say MyClass::BorderColor::Red, you had to say MyClass::Red.  If your class has a lot of enums in it, they all get scoped to the class and this just gets messy. 

Of course they can’t just change the language without risking compatibility so the new syntax will look like:

1	<p>class MyClass<br>{<br>&nbsp; enum&nbsp;class BorderColor { Red, Green, Blue };<br>};</p>

I can live with that.

Check out the full details here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 7:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.