The usage of anonymous enums

Question

What is the purpose of anonymous enum declarations such as:

enum { color = 1 };

Why not just declare int color = 1

Answer 1

I dont see it mentioned, another use is to scope your constants. I currently work on code that was written using Visual Studio 2005, and it is now ported to android - g++. In VS2005 you could have code like this enum MyOpts { OPT1 = 1 }; and use it as MyOpts::OPT1 - and compiler did not complain about it, even though it is not valid. g++ reports such code as error, so one solution is to use anonymous enum as follows: struct MyOpts { enum {OPT1 =1}; };, and now both compilers are happy.