On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:13 PM, larry@garfieldtech.com <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote:
Peter's suggestion may work for D6, but for D7, I refer people to Eaton's "How to make good APIs" session from DCDC. Digest version: If you expect people to extend your list of flags/constants/modes, for the love of god use strings, not ints. Ints WILL break. Don't be stupid, use strings.
Hummm. Ints, strings, these are just ways to express bits of information. Each character of a string will have approx 5 bit of info (or a bit less, 26 english chars, underscore, thats 27 not 32 but lets say 32). It also must be noted that its unlikely you will use all possible combinations, I bet XRNQW will not be used for example... I am with Peter, his proposal makes sense to me and can code more possibilities than strings.