Julia: High Performance Programming

Enumerations (revisited)

One problem with our vehicle type is that the fuel is defined as a string, whereas it would be better to restrict the choice to set of values. Previously, we discussed a macro that provides one approach to enumerations. In the absence of a preferred definition in Julia, various developers have adopted different strategies and I'll provide our own here.

First, we will use a vector of type {Any} to hold the enumerated values. This could be consts using integers or strings, but I'll restrict it to a list of symbols and create the vnum.jl file to hold the following:

typealias VecAny Array{Any,1}
function vnum(syms::Symbol...)
  A = {}
  for v in syms
    push!(A,v)
  end
  A
end
function vidx(A::VecAny, a::Symbol)
 for (i, v) in enumerate(A) ...