Hello, gophers. Lately I've been working quite a bit with enums as I'm
moving a C program I had to Go, so I wondered if there was any progress on
enums proposals and realized that none of them get anywhere without
breaking the Go1 compatibility.
I've decided to get a bit creative and share with you the proposals I've
thought of.
The fundamental thing when we talk about the incorporation of "robust
enums" is, similarly to the case of generics, to propose a syntax extension
to the language without breaking compatibility with the previous software.
We use enumerations simply to handle states and encapsulate them under a
name. Therefore I wanted to propose the following syntax:
```proposal
const (<ENUM_TYPE>) <NAME> <TYPE> = <VALUE>
```
The idea of this syntax is that, roughly speaking, it reminds us of what we
do when we declare a method, with the only difference that in this case we
use constant values associated to some "enum type". Then, we should be able
to call our constants as follows: <ENUM_TYPE>.<CONSTANT_NAME>, the same
would be true for an already instantiated type.
```example
type Statement struct{ /* ... */ }
type StatementTyp int
const (Statement) (
Prepared StatementTyp = iota
Success
Fail
)
func main() {
stmt := Statement{}
fmt.Println(Statement.Prepared) // 0
fmt.Println(stmt.Success) // 1
}
```
Realistically speaking this doesn't solve much. It just gives us a way to
encapsulate constants in an "elegant" way and keeps the "const-iota"
syntax, but little else.
I think it is essential to have an extra way to reference these internal
values of a type so that we can work with the help of the go-typechecker.
For this I could only come up with two types of syntax, let's see:
```prop1
var bar const <ENUM_TYPE>
func foo(arg const <ENUM_TYPE>) {...}
```
```prop2
var foo <ENUM_TYPE>.const
func bar(arg <ENUM_TYPE>.const)
```
That would be all, I hope you can give some feedback and know what you
think. I read in the go2-language-template
<https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/go2-language-changes.md>
that it was better to post my ideas in this group instead of making a issue.
Thanks for reading ^^
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