Question

I have just started C very recently and I have been asked to answer some coding exercises in which the following piece of code appears:

typedef enum {
  false = 0,
  true = 1
} Bool;

Could someone please provide a brief and clear explanation to that?

Thanks very much.

Answer 1

It’s really doing two things; you can break it down something like this:

enum _bool {
   false = 0,
   true = 1
};

And:

typedef enum _bool Bool;

This code creates a new enumeration type and then uses typedef to give it a convenient name. It would let you use a new ‘type’ called Bool elsewhere in your code, and assign it the values false and true. Here’s a simple use case:

Bool logical_not(Bool in)
{
    if (in == true)
        return false;
    else
        return true;
}