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Date: Tue, 21 May 2024 17:35:47 -0500
To: "php internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [Discussion]
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From: larry@garfieldtech.com ("Larry Garfield")

On Tue, May 21, 2024, at 5:30 PM, Bilge wrote:
> Hi Internals,
>
> I struggle to understand the benefit of "basic" enumerations and their 
> diminished API. In particular, I often find myself wanting to use 
> `from()/``tryFrom()` to convert a string to an enumeration. To do this, 
> I must convert it to a "backed" enum and copy & paste each name to its 
> value. In all other regards, I still want it to behave like a "basic" 
> enumeration, so I won't abuse the value of the names to act like a 
> mapping; the values will always mirror the names, and if I need to do 
> any mappings, I'll add match() functions.
>
> My question, then, is why can't basic enumerations have these semantics 
> by default? Or, to state it more concretely, what would be the downside 
> to having all "basic" enumerations actually being "backed" enumerations 
> whose values implicitly mirror their names for the purposes of 
> converting to/from strings? Would this not make basic enumeration more 
> useful without any particular downsides?
>
> Kind regards,
> Bilge

Making enums not be "fancy strings" was a very deliberate decision.  The RFC covers that some.  There's more information in our comparison research here:

https://github.com/Crell/enum-comparison

And I wrote an article about enum usage a while back here:

https://peakd.com/hive-168588/@crell/on-the-use-of-enums

--Larry Garfield