[omniORB] Using #include in IDL files

[James M. Moe]

On Wed, 12 May 1999 15:54:32 -0500, Nathan Banks wrote:

>While on the subject: To whom do I voice my request that IDL enumeration members
>should have an optional author specified value?  When I attempt to model in IDL my
>legacy telecom backends' use of value specified enumerations, I get frustrated because
>IDL will not allow me to specify a value for an enumeration.  I suppose a major intent
>of IDL is 'brevity of expresssion' and I should 'hold the party line' and keep on
>writing my 'boring' legacy enumeration to IDL enumeration translation logic.

    That is a very C-specific langauge aspect. Other languages, such as Pascal or Ada, 
do not have any way to define the value of an enumeration. It is expected to use them 
like constants, sort of, without ever needing to know the value. Also, non-C languages 
allow an enumeration to define the range of an array, something that cannot be done in 
C. 
    The point of all this is that to allow assignment of enumeration values would break 
IDL for almost all other languages besides C.



Jim Moe