Enforce strong type checking in C (type strictness for typedefs)

Question

Is there a way to enforce explicit cast for typedefs of the same type? I\'ve to deal with utf8 and sometimes I get confused with the indices for the character count and the

Answer 1

With C++11 you can use an enum class, e.g.

enum class char_idx_t : unsigned int {};
enum class byte_idx_t : unsigned int {};

The compiler will enforce an explicit cast between the two types; it is like a thin wrapper class. Unfortunately you won't have operator overloading, e.g. if you want to add two char_idx_t together you will have to cast them to unsigned int.