Question

I have two enums in my code:

enum Month {January, February, March, April, May, June, July,
        August, September, October, November, December};
enum ShortMonth {Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec};

May is a common element in both enums, so the compiler says:

Redeclaration of enumerator ‘May‘.

Why does it say so? And how can I circumvent this?

Answer 1

Enum names are in global scope, they need to be unique. Remember that you don’t need to qualify the enum symbols with the enum name, you do just:

Month xmas = December;

not:

Month xmas = Month.December;  /* This is not C. */

For this reason, you often see people prefixing the symbol names with the enum’s name:

enum Month { Month_January, Month_February, /* and so on */ };