enum-int casting: operator or function

Question

In the external code that I am using there is enum:

enum En {VALUE_A, VALUE_B, VALUE_C};

In another external code that I am using there ar

Answer 1

While implicit casting is more convenient than translation functions it is also less obvious to see what's going on. An approach being both, convenient and obvious, might be to use your own class with overloaded cast operators. When casting a custom type into an enum or int it won't be easy to overlook some custom casting.

If creating a class for this is not an option for whatever reason, I would go for the translation functions as readability during maintenance is more important than convenience when writing the code.