Question

I am currently migrating my code from the old-style enum to enum class.

The strong-typing is nice, but I came across a point in the code where I needed to call ncurses’s init_pair() function which takes a short int as its first argument, but which I have converted to an enum class for developer-friendly reading.

To make the compiler happy, it seems that I need to use a static_cast<short int>() on the first parameter.

Is there a cleaner approach or if I must use the static_cast, how do you recommend that I use it?

Accepted Answer: Chris Dodd’s answer is good. Before the switch, I had ints all over the place representing the old-style enums. After the switch, I have one dirty cast with type-safe enums all over the rest of the code. The dirtiness is isolated to one spot, the code is safer, and it’s easier to read. This is a marked improvement.

Answer 1

The cleanest way is probably to define an overloaded inline version of init_pair that takes an enum and casts it to call the normal version:

inline int init_pair(enum_type pair, short f, short b) {
    return init_pair(static_cast<short>(pair), f, b);
}

That way users can call it with you enum type and it will just work