> I have a game class, and the game has a state. Seeing that Python has > no enumeration type, at first I used strings to represent states: > "paused", "running", etc. But such a representation has many > negatives, so I decided to look at the Enum implementation given > here:http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/413486
I frequently use strings in place of enumeration in python. I have found it to be very useful. I'm curious about the _many negatives_ you have found? For example, I wrote a module and one of the parameters to a function was `mode`. Two of the modes were ALL_MODE and ONE_MODE. At first I enumerated the modes: MODES = ALL_MODE, ONE_MODE = 0, 1 And code using the mode tended to look something like this: from package import module module.foo(mode=module.ALL_MODE) Of course, the following would also work, but isn't self descriptive: module.foo(mode=0) Then, after some user feedback I changed it to this: MODES = ALL_MODE, ONE_MODE = "all one".split() This maintained backwards compatabilty, but users could use the much more concise (but still readable) version: module.foo(mode="all") Since then, I have adopted using strings in place of enum types as a best practice. Matt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
