Looking to associate strings to ints in a cleaner/more efficient way

Question

How can I improve this?

The relationship is one to one and continuous on [-1,5] so i was thinking of using enum, but I\'m not sure how to compare a string value to

Answer 1

Inspired by your enum comment, I present the following. It's a bit hackish, but:

enum Word
{
    PROGRAM (1), BEGIN (2), END (3), INT (4), IF (5);

    public int value;

    public Word (int value)
    {
        this.value = value;
    }
};

int evaluateWord (String word)
{
    return Word.valueOf(word.toUpperCase( )).value;
}

I love Java enums because you can do things like this. This is especially useful if you later want to (for example) add a unique behaviour for each word, or to maintain a long list of words. Note though that it is case insensitive.

Or, alternately:

enum Word
{
    PROGRAM, BEGIN, END, INT, IF;
};

int evaluateWord (String word)
{
    return Word.valueOf(word.toUpperCase( )).ordinal( ) + 1;
}