Initializing enum with strings

[Russell Shaw]

Hi,
gcc-3.4 complains about non-integers in:

enum {IDENTIFIER = "<identifie r>", WIDGETDEF = "widgetdef" };

even if i cast the strings to integers.

[Peter Nilsson]

Keith Thompson wrote:

Russell Shaw <rjshawN_o@s_pa m.netspace.net. au> writes:
[...]

You should be able to cast a const string pointer to an int so that
one could do: enum {an_enum = (int)"the first enum"}.
The type of "the first enum" is not const qualified.
It's cleaner than #defines.
gcc complains "enumerator value for `an_enum' not integer constant".

The message is actually slightly misleading; it has to be a constant
expression, not an integer constant.

More precisely, it must be an integer constant expression.
But gcc is correct; a cast of an address cannot be part of an integer
constant expression.

You can convert a pointer to an int in a context that doesn't require
a constant expression, but the result is not necessarily useful. For
example, if pointers are 8 bytes and ints are 4 bytes, two distinct
pointer values might convert to the same int value.

This notwithstanding , and as has been pointed out elsethread, there's
always...

const char the_first_enum[] = "the first enum";

Synchronising enums and strings has also been discussed in clc before.

--
Peter