What is the benefit of defining enumerators as a DUT?

Question

The main goal of defining enumerators is to assign a variable to some numbers and their equal strings as I understand.

We can define var a as an enum everywhere in the initializing section of our Program or Function Block like this:

a:(start,stop,operate);

tough I don't know why we can't see that in tabular view but there there is a big question that:

What is the benefit of defining enumerators as a DUT?

Answer 1

There are 3 main benefits for me:

1. You can use the same enum in multiples function blocks
2. You can use TO_STRING on enums declared as DUTs (After enabling it with {attribute 'to_string'} Infosys
3. You can use refactoring on names of each component, which is impossible with local enums

Answer 2

When defining an enum as a DUT it is available everywhere in your code (global scope). This is helpful in many cases, but in general it is not good programming practice to have a lot of stuff available in the global scope.

Here is a bit elaboration on the topic.