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Asked: 2026-05-21T07:00:20+00:00

In a discussion, a colleague told me that he never uses enum because he

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In a discussion, a colleague told me that he never uses enum because he experienced that some C-compilers don’t cope with the enum statement correctly.

He couldn’t remember which compiler exactly had problems but among the problems, there were errors when doing something like

enum my_enum{
  my_enum_first  = 5;
  my_enum_second = 10;
};

i.e. initializing enum values instead of letting the compiler do the automatic assignment. Another one was that the compiler decides for itself how big the enum is and therefore you could have unpredictable behavior for sizeof my_enum when compiling your code under various platforms.

To get around that, he told me to better use #defines to define the constant elements. But especially for using doxygen it’s quite handy to have an enum (e.g. as function parameter) because in the generated documentation, you could simply click on my_enum and directly jump to the description of my_enum.

Another example would be code completion, where your IDE tells you what you could specify as valid parameters for functions. I know that – as long as you’re compiling the code as C-code – that there’s no type-safety (i.e. I could also specify 5 instead of my_enum_first), so the use of an enum seems to be a more cosmetic thing.

The question is: do you know any compilers that have limitations regarding the usage of enum?

Edit 1:
Regarding the environment: we are developing for various embedded platforms, so there could also be a compiler for some obscure micro-controller…

Edit 2:
He could tell me that the KEIL C51 compiler didn’t play well with enums. Are there any experiences with current versions of the C51 compiler?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m pretty sure that a compiler that doesn’t play nice with enum is an invalid compiler – enum is specified in the standard, so a failure to implement it means the compiler shouldn’t technically be used to compile C (For the record, the scope of enumeration types is discussed in 6.2.1 and defined as a type in 6.2.5 (of C99), so one would assume that it’s a valid part of the standard from thereon in)!
    So no, I don’t know of any such compilers.

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