Setting Enumerator Values

You can set enumerator values explicitly by using the assignment operator:

enum bits{one = 1, two = 2, four = 4, eight = 8};

The assigned values must be integers. You also can define just some of the enumerators explicitly:

enum bigstep{first, second = 100, third};

In this case, first is 0 by default. Subsequent uninitialized enumerators are larger by one than their predecessors. So, third would have the value 101.

Finally, you can create more than one enumerator with the same value:

enum {zero, null = 0, one, numero_uno = 1};

Here, both zero and null are 0, and both one and numero_uno are 1. In earlier versions of C++, you could assign only int values (or values that promote to int) to enumerators, but that restriction has been removed so that you can use type long or even long long values.