On Tue, May 21, 2024, at 5:30 PM, Bilge wrote: > Hi Internals, > > I struggle to understand the benefit of "basic" enumerations and their > diminished API. In particular, I often find myself wanting to use > `from()/``tryFrom()` to convert a string to an enumeration. To do this, > I must convert it to a "backed" enum and copy & paste each name to its > value. In all other regards, I still want it to behave like a "basic" > enumeration, so I won't abuse the value of the names to act like a > mapping; the values will always mirror the names, and if I need to do > any mappings, I'll add match() functions. > > My question, then, is why can't basic enumerations have these semantics > by default? Or, to state it more concretely, what would be the downside > to having all "basic" enumerations actually being "backed" enumerations > whose values implicitly mirror their names for the purposes of > converting to/from strings? Would this not make basic enumeration more > useful without any particular downsides? > > Kind regards, > Bilge
Making enums not be "fancy strings" was a very deliberate decision. The RFC covers that some. There's more information in our comparison research here: https://github.com/Crell/enum-comparison And I wrote an article about enum usage a while back here: https://peakd.com/hive-168588/@crell/on-the-use-of-enums --Larry Garfield
