I've been looking through the D documents again recently, and I have a few questions that I haven't located in the newsgroup. I'll post them as separate documents to keep threading and subject lines relevant.

With no preprocessor (something I generally approve of), there's no stringize mechanism. In the list of preprocessor idioms that are accounted for in other ways, I didn't see anything about stringizing or printing the values of enums in symbolic (text) form rather than as a number.

If I have X as an enum and print out X, I'd like to have it print as its enum rather than as an integer.

Any hope for some help with this (in my experience) common problem?

- Kent

I second this desire (without arguing for a preprocessor).  All that distinguishes an enum from a simple integer is the string attached, and there should be some programmatic way to access that.

Mark

In general, while using any programming language, it does not prohibit you to preprocess your source code with whatever preprocessor, e.g. sed, perl, cpp, you like before compiling the source code.

I suppose you may simply use the C preprocessor to process the source code before compiling the source code with the D compiler.

I agree with the D language designer that preprocessing should not be part of any programming language. And that means if you use any kind of preprocessing, be careful about all the potential problems.

Kiyo

"Kent Quirk" <Kent_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:b0016h$dm0$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> I've been looking through the D documents again recently, and I have a few questions that I haven't located in the newsgroup. I'll post them as
separate
> documents to keep threading and subject lines relevant.
>
> With no preprocessor (something I generally approve of), there's no
stringize
> mechanism. In the list of preprocessor idioms that are accounted for in
other
> ways, I didn't see anything about stringizing or printing the values of
enums in
> symbolic (text) form rather than as a number.
>
> If I have X as an enum and print out X, I'd like to have it print as its
enum
> rather than as an integer.
>
> Any hope for some help with this (in my experience) common problem?
>
> - Kent

I believe that D supports that with the .toString() property.

Or it should.

enum colors { red, green, blue }
printf("%*s", colors.red.toString()); // should print "red"

If you want the integral value as a string, cast to int first.

char[] rednumstr = cast(int)(colors.red).toString();

Sean

"Mark Evans" <Mark_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:b00468$fl6$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> I second this desire (without arguing for a preprocessor).  All that distinguishes an enum from a simple integer is the string attached, and
there
> should be some programmatic way to access that.
>
> Mark