Extending an enum via inheritance

Question

I know this rather goes against the idea of enums, but is it possible to extend enums in C#/Java? I mean \"extend\" in both the sense of adding new values to an enum, but a

Answer 1

I didn't see anyone else mention this but the ordinal value of an enum is important. For example, with grails when you save an enum to the database it uses the ordinal value. If you could somehow extend an enum, what would be the ordinal values of your extensions? If you extended it in multiple places how could you preserve some kind of order to these ordinals? Chaos/instability in the ordinal values would be a bad thing which is probably another reason why the language designers have not touched this.

Another difficulty if you were the language designer, how can you preserve the functionality of the values() method which is supposed to return all of the enum values. What would you invoke this on and how would it gather up all of the values?