Question

I am currently using an enumeration to describe a number of possible operating system platforms. I have things WIN32, SOLARIS64, LINUX32, but also broader categories like ALLWIN and ALLUNIX. I have a place in my code where I need to decide if a given Platform falls into the category of another one. To me, this sounded like inheritance, but obviously enumerations can’t inherit from each other.

I then had the thought of turning these Platforms from 1 enumeration into empty classes that inherit from each other. I feel like this is a terrible idea conceptually and spatially, but not being a master of C# I thought I’d post here looking for some more experienced opinions. Any thoughts?

This would look something like:

public class ALL {};

  public class ALLWIN : ALL {};

    public class WINNT : ALLWIN{};

      public class WIN32 : WINNT{};

…
And so on and so forth.

Answer 1

You want to stick with enumerations for this. You can do the checking via a bitmask. Something along the lines of:

[FlagsAttribute]
enum Systems {
    WinNT = 1,
    Win32 = 2,
    Linux32 = 4,
    Solaris = 8,
    AllWin = WinNT | Win32, // do a bitwise OR of each of the Windows systems
    AllUnix = Linux32 | Solaris // same thing here for Unix systems
}

And when you’re checking to see if the platform is of a specific system, you’ll do so by doing a bitwise AND as in the following code:

if (platform & Systems.AllWin > 0) { 
  // this is a Windows system 
}

Does that make sense?