Enums in Eiffel

Preface

Something pondered for years was the question regarding why Eiffel has never embraced Enum types or a variant more in style with the Eiffel paradigm. There are a number of comments from numerous developers regarding why Enums are "Bad". Most languages exhibit bad ideals and some more than others. The congisen is that if you give a developer a tool to abuse it will be abused and sometimes by the seasoned developers. Generally, seasoned developers have a grasp of the dangers of abusing aspects of a language to gain performance or micro design. However lessons are learned from those who know better from those that know less. As such bad programming practices creep down the chain until it become a common convention.

In this document I'll outline the pontetial dangers and the oddities found commonly with the "Enum" type and attempt to dispell them with a solution to implementing Enums in Eiffel. First and foremost, Why does Eiffel need an Enum type...

Why Does Eiffel Need an Enum Type

The reasons are numerous and leaves us asking why they were not approached in the ECMA specification.

As Eiffel evolves and rears its head into the mainstream, its application domain expands. Users, libraries and complexity all grows as a languages does. It has been long said that Eiffel is almost unique in its ability to self-document classes and routines through terse comments and contracts. However, Eiffel for being so terse with commenting, is extremely verbose with class interfaces which can be trying at times.

Enums for Brevity

To demonstrate a point of Eiffel's verboseness, due to the lack of an Enum type specification, turn you eyes to EV_TEXT_ALIGNABLE:

deferred class
    EV_TEXT_ALIGNABLE
 
feature -- Access
 
    text_alignment: INTEGER is
            -- Current alignment.
            -- See class EV_TEXT_ALIGNABLE_CONSTANTS for
            -- possible values.
        require
            not_destroyed: not is_destroyed
        ensure
            bridge_ok: Result = implementation.text_alignment
 
feature -- Status report
 
    is_left_aligned: BOOLEAN is
            -- Is `Current' left aligned?
        require
            not_destroyed: not is_destroyed
 
    is_center_aligned: BOOLEAN is
            -- Is `Current' center aligned?
        require
            not_destroyed: not is_destroyed
 
    is_right_aligned: BOOLEAN is
            -- Is `Current' right aligned?
        require
            not_destroyed: not is_destroyed
 
feature -- Status setting
 
    align_text_center is
            -- Display `text' centered.
        require
            not_destroyed: not is_destroyed
        ensure
            alignment_set: is_center_aligned
 
    align_text_right is
            -- Display `text' right aligned.
        require
            not_destroyed: not is_destroyed
        ensure
            alignment_set: is_right_aligned
 
    align_text_left is
            -- Display `text' left aligned.
        require
            not_destroyed: not is_destroyed
        ensure
            alignment_set: is_left_aligned
 
invariant
    valid_alignment:
        (create {EV_TEXT_ALIGNMENT_CONSTANTS}).valid_alignment (text_alignment)
 
end

In EV_TEXT_ALIGNMENT there is already is text_alignment, which exhibits the inherent problem with type saftey through the lack of an Enum type. No only is a flag attribute present but there are the status setting routines align_text_left, align_text_right and align_text_center. On top of that, for the sake of code clarity for clients there are the status queries is_left_aligned, is_right_aligned and is_center_aligned. The status setting and query routines hide the implementation details of having to know and use EV_TEXT_ALIGNMENT_CONSTANTS, which is a good thing but can also be very frustrating when writing effective code using this interface.

To demonstrate, assume a graphical editor has been developed using EiffelVision2. In the editor the user selects a region of text which should enabled tool bar button used to manipulate the alignment of the selected region to text.

on_text_selected
    require
        has_selection: has_selection
    local
        l_alignable: EV_TEXT_ALIGNABLE
    do
        l_alignable ?= selected_entity
        if l_alignable /= Void then
            if l_alignable.is_left_aligned then
                active_button := left_aligned_button
            elseif l_alignable.is_center_aligned then
                active_button := center_aligned_button
            elseif l_alignable.is_right_aligned then
                active_button := right_aligned_button
            else
                    -- New alignment not respect!
                check False end
            end
        end
        if active_button /= Void
            alignment_button_group.set_active_button (active_button)
            alignment_button_group.enable_sensitive
        else
            alignment_button_group.disable_sensitive
        end
    end

on_text_selected