Enumerations: Why? When?

Question

I am an almost-graduating computer science student, and throughout my coding career, I\'ve found very few instances where enumerations, except for canonical cases such as re

Answer 1

I think you're talking about Enumerations, not Enumerators.

Enumerations are a good fit for anywhere in your application where you might otherwise use "magic strings" or "magic numbers".

The easiest area to understand their use is in File Access. Each file access mode (Read, Write, Append) is represented in the Enumeration. If you were using "magic numbers", you might have something that looks like:

public static class Constants
{
    public static final int FILEMODE_READ = 1;
    public static final int FILEMODE_WRITE = 2;
    public static final int FILEMODE_APPEND = 3;
}

When you could express the intent much more clearly and succinctly using an Enumeration:

public enum FileMode
{
    Read,
    Write,
    Append
}