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Do you believe it's okay to use type-casting with enums?

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Started by superman3275 December 22, 2012 04:52 PM

4 comments, last by Waterlimon 11 years, 4 months ago

superman3275

2,061

Author

December 22, 2012 04:52 PM

Recently, I've been using an enumeration called "tileType" when I load my map from a file. The file contains an array of numbers, so when I load a number I have to explicit type-cast it to the type "tileType" before I can load it into the Tow-Dimensional vector I use to keep my map's values. Is this okay? There's no other way unless I make a very specific switch statement, which would completely break if I changed anything the slightest bit, which wouldn't work.

What do you think? Sorry for the little information, I had to finish up quickly. Cheers :)!

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Cornstalks

7,033

December 22, 2012 04:58 PM

So long as the number corresponds to an actual value in the enum, it's safe. If you want to be pedantic you could switch on the integer (not the casted enumerated type), and have cases for the enumeration values (and a default case to catch invalid values) (at least I think this would be a viable option in your case; it's hard to tell without more info).

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SiCrane

11,840

December 22, 2012 05:01 PM

How good it is and what other options you might have depend on factors like what the enum is supposed to represent, whether or not non-enumerated enum values are valid (such as with a bit flag enum), whether or not the file being loaded is text or binary, what language you are using and so on.

0r0d

2,059

December 22, 2012 05:41 PM

Should be ok as long as you explicitly give each enum value a number, and then dont reuse that value later if you remove an enum. You want to make sure what you saved will always be loaded as what it is, or not at all if it's deprecated.

Khatharr

8,814

December 22, 2012 05:57 PM

If the enumerated values are all sequential then you could just do a range check if you're concerned about getting bad values from the file.

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Waterlimon

4,401

December 22, 2012 08:17 PM

If youre worried about the values for some reason not matching you could make ab array of lenght x that contains enum values. So you can use that to convert them back and forth, ans can decide what enum corresponds to what integer.

o3o

Do you believe it's okay to use type-casting with enums?

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