Learn C Programming - Second Edition

8

Creating and Using Enumerations

The real world is complicated – far more complicated than just whole numbers, numbers with fractions, Boolean values, and characters. In order to model it, C provides various mechanisms for custom and complex data types. For the next eight chapters, we are going to explore various ways that our intrinsic data types can be extended and combined to more closely match the real world.

The first of these extensible data types is enumerated types. These are named values that are grouped because of some conceptual relationship we want to give them; we don't really care about their values – we differentiate each item in the group by its name. There is a value corresponding to each name, but usually, although not always, ...