Question

I’m browsing an open source .NET twain wrapper and saw this:

[Flags]
internal enum TwDG : short
{                                   // DG_.....
    Control = 0x0001,
    Image = 0x0002,
    Audio = 0x0004
}

What exactly does that ‘Flag’ decorator mean? (Is it called a ‘decorator’?)

Also, what does the short mean at the end of the enum declaration?

Thanks!

Answer 1

short is another keyword for System.Int16, a two-byte integer ranging from -32,768 to 32,767. By default, an enum’s base type is int; in this case, they’re attempting to use a smaller data type to store the enumerator values.