12 May
2020
12 May
'20
12:25 a.m.
On 5/11/20, Greg A. Woods <woods(a)robohack.ca> wrote:
Indeed.
-Paul W.
The lameness of typedef (and in how enum is related to typedef) is one
of the saddest parts of C. (The other is the default promotion to int.)
I would add a third: file-scope declarations being global by default.
One must use the keyword "static" to restrict a file-scope declaration
to the file it's declared in. And why "static"? All file-scope
declarations have static allocation. Why isn't the keyword "local" or
"own"? Anyway, the way it ought to be is that file-scope declarations
are restricted to the file they're declared in. To make the symbol
visible outside its file, you should have to explicitly say "global".
It would be trivial to fix too -- for a
"new" C, that is. Making it
backward compatible for legacy code would be tough, even with tooling to
help fix the worst issues. I've seen far too much code that would be
hard to fix by hand, e.g. some that even goes so far as to assume things
like arithmetic on enum values will produce other valid enum values.
This ought to be easy to fix using a compiler command line option for
the legacy behavior. Many C compilers do this already to support K&R
semantics vs. standard C semantics.
Ideally enums could be a value in any native type,
including float/double.
Except pointers, of course.
IMHO, without
your semantics, enums are pretty useless, #define is good
enough and more clear.
Actually that's no longer true with a good modern toolchain, especially
with respect to the debugger. A good debugger can now show the enum
symbol for a (matching) value of a properly typedefed variable.