🚀 go-pugleaf

mtm4@rsvl.unisys.com (Michael McCormick) wrote:
>"W. Dicks" <wd@isis.co.za> shared the following on 13 Mar 96 07:31:13 GMT:
>
>>The system that I'm working often needs to know the string 
>>value of an enum. e.g. enum week{MON=1, ..., SUN} it; it = 
>>TUE;
>>Then when this enum is passed as a parameter the function 
>>should return the string based on the enum. For instance, 
>>weekImage(it) will return "TUE". Is it not possible that such 
>>a functionality can be built into enums?
>
>What you are essentially asking for is language support for converting
>a label into a string respresentation of its name.  That is a very
>unusual feature to find in any language, since it would require the
>compiler to place the symbolic dictionary in the executable file.  I
>don't think there's a snowball's chance of this getting into C++.

It's not _that_ unusual. Ada has had this feature starting with 
Ada-83 (the 'image attribute).

Actually, I've done the above in C++ by wrapping the enum of 
interest in a class, placing a static array of const strings 
in the implementation-file and providing an accessor member 
function that simply indexes into the array and returns the 
appropriate string (or a const char* to it, anyhow).
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