Ada Programming/Types/Enumeration

An enumeration type is defined as a list of possible values:

Primary_Color (Red, Green, Blue);

Like for numeric types, where e.g. 1 is an integer literal, Red, Green and Blue are called the literals of this type. There are no other values assignable to objects of this type.

Operators and attributes
Apart from equality ("="), the only operators on enumeration types are the ordering operators: "<", "<=", "=", "/=", ">=", ">", where the order relation is given implicitly by the sequence of literals: Each literal has a position, starting with 0 for the first, incremented by one for each successor. This position can be queried via the 'Pos attribute; the inverse is 'Val, which returns the corresponding literal. In our example:

Primary_Color' (Red) = 0 Primary_Color' (0)  = Red

There are two other important attributes: and  (don't confuse  with ). returns the string representation of the value (in capital letters), is the inverse:

Primary_Color' ( Red ) = "RED" Primary_Color' ("Red") = Red

These attributes are important for simple IO (there are more elaborate IO facilities in for enumeration types). Note that, since Ada is case-insensitive, the string given to 'Value can be in any case.

Enumeration literals
Literals are overloadable, i.e. you can have another type with the same literals.

Traffic_Light (Red, Yellow, Green);

Overload resolution within the context of use of a literal normally resolves which Red is meant. Only if you have an unresolvable overloading conflict, you can qualify with special syntax which Red is meant:

Primary_Color'(Red)

Like many other declarative items, enumeration literals can be renamed. In fact, such a literal is actually a function, so it has to be renamed as such:

Red P.Primary_Color  P.Red;

Here, Primary_Color is assumed to be defined in package P, which is visible at the place of the renaming declaration. Renaming makes Red directly visible without necessity to resort the use-clause.

Note that redeclaration as a function does not affect the staticness of the literal.

Characters as enumeration literals
Rather unique to Ada is the use of character literals as enumeration literals:

ABC ('A', 'B', 'C');

This literal 'A' has nothing in common with the literal 'A' of the predefined type Character (or Wide_Character).

Every type that has at least one character literal is a character type. For every character type, string literals and the concatenation operator "&" are also implicitly defined.

My_Character (No_Character, 'a', Literal, 'z'); My_String  (Positive  <>)  My_Character; S: My_String := "aa" & Literal & "za" & 'z'; T: My_String := ('a', 'a', Literal, 'z', 'a', 'z');

In this example, S and T have the same value.

Ada's Character type is defined that way. See Ada Programming/Libraries/Standard.

Booleans as enumeration literals
Also Booleans are defined as enumeration types:

Boolean (False, True);

There is special semantics implied with this declaration in that objects and expressions of this type can be used as conditions. Note that the literals False and True are not Ada keywords.

Thus it is not sufficient to declare a type with these literals and then hope objects of this type can be used like so:

My_Boolean (False, True); Condition: My_Boolean; Condition -- wrong, won't compile

If you need your own Booleans (perhaps with special size requirements), you have to derive from the predefined Boolean:

My_Boolean  Boolean; Condition: My_Boolean; Condition -- OK

Enumeration subtypes
You can use  to subtype an enumeration type:

Capital_Letter Character  'A' .. 'Z';

Day_Of_Week (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday); Working_Day Day_Of_Week  Monday .. Friday;

Using enumerations
Enumeration types being scalar subtypes, type attributes such as First and Succ will allow stepping through a subsequence of the values.

Day_Of_Week Sunday ISO (False); Day_Of_Week (Sunday) ISO (True); Tuesday .. Saturday Program_Error; ;

A loop will automatically step through the values of the subtype's range. Filtering week days to include only working days with an even position number:

Day Working_Day Day_Of_Week (Day) 2  0 Work_In_Backyard; ;      ;

Enumeration types can be used as array index subtypes, yielding a table feature:

Officer_ID  0 .. 50;   Schedule   (Working_Day)  Officer_ID;

Wikibook

 * Ada Programming
 * Ada Programming/Types
 * Ada Programming/Libraries/Standard
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'First
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Last
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Pred
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Succ
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Img
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Image
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Value
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Pos
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Val
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Enum_Rep
 * Ada_Programming/Attributes/'Enum_Val

Ada Reference Manual


|Enumeration

Programación en Ada/Tipos/Enumeraciones