On Mar 18, 2014, at 1:36 PM, Christian Thalinger 
<christian.thalin...@oracle.com> wrote:

> Why are we not using an Enum instead of an "untyped" byte?

Byte is moderately typed, in the sense (which I rely on during development) 
that you can't assign an int or char to a byte w/o a cast.
That's why it is not just a plain int.

But those values (L_TYPE etc.) are used a lot as numbers, and specifically as 
low-level array indexes, and also comparisons (x < V_TYPE).

To turn them into enums, we'd have to add lots of calls to '.ordinal()' to turn 
them right back to numbers.  That dilutes (completely IMO) the value they have 
as enums to raise the level of the code.

— John
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