What's an enum class and why should I care?

Question

For one who has never written a line of C++11, and who has, at the moment, no opportunity to program in C++11, can you, in one short paragraph., tell me:

What is an "enum class" and why do we need it?

Answer 1

enum class is called a scoped enumeration. It prevents polluting the namespace where the enumeration appears with the names of the enumerators.

In C++03, you could do effectively the same thing by putting the enum inside a dedicated class. Perhaps that's the source of the syntax, which is a bit confusing.

Another difference is that the enumerators of such a type don't convert implicitly to int (static_cast<int> is required). This may be seldom needed but it makes it safe to overload a function taking an int argument with one taking enum type. You can be sure the int won't be called by accident. Or you can define pseudo-integral types with dedicated operator functions, and be sure that built-in operators won't interfere.

It's a bit annoying that these two unrelated differences come in the same package, and that you can't get an unscoped enumeration with no implicit conversion, but generally both changes are Good Things and enum class is a good default practice in C++11.

EDIT: A scoped enumeration is defined like this:

enum class duck { huey, dewey, louie };

and must be used with the scope resolution operator :: like this:

duck culprit = duck::huey; // or "auto culprit" to avoid redundancy

Note that the :: operator also works with C++03 unscoped enumerations, so the second line above would work even if the first was missing class.

This might be excessive detail, but class does not go into the elaborated-type-specifier if forward declaring the enumerated type, as in

void quack( enum duck whom ); // not "enum class"

However, there is a construct new in C++11, the opaque-enum-declaration, which does include the class keyword and defines a complete type.

enum duck; // duck is declared as incomplete type
enum class duck; // duck is now complete type; underlying type defaults to int

The keyword struct can be substituted for class with no semantic difference.