How can I represent an 'Enum' in Python?

Answer 1

So, I agree. Let's not enforce type safety in Python, but I would like to protect myself from silly mistakes. So what do we think about this?

class Animal(object):
    values = ['Horse','Dog','Cat']

    class __metaclass__(type):
        def __getattr__(self, name):
            return self.values.index(name)

It keeps me from value-collision in defining my enums.

>>> Animal.Cat
2

There's another handy advantage: really fast reverse lookups:

def name_of(self, i):
    return self.values[i]