Question

I’m just trying to figure out if the values themselves are int, unsigned int, NSInteger. I thought I saw someone say that they were unsigned ints, but in Apple’s header files I’ve seen them used to store negative values.

Answer 1

An enum is a feature of C (and C++), not Objective-C. When you declare an enum you declare a new C data type.

The size of a given enum data type may be the size of a int, or it may only be just large enough to hold each of the declared enum values. It’s compiler specific, and there are usually compiler settings to control how enums are handled.

The largest an enum can be is int, so you can always convert any enum value to an int. The reverse is not true; you cannot necessarily convert any int to an enum value.