Hi Gaurav,
I think you should refer to ISO/IEC 14882 and/or ISO/IEC 9899.
An enum occupies the same space as a {signed|unsigned} int -- the natural
word size of the architecture of the machine in question.
The -fshort-enums option of GCC should only be used with due caution.
In C++, if you want the backing store of an enum-esque object to be a byte
(a {signed|unsigned|nonsigned} char), you can do something like this:
class Frobitz
{
unsigned char m;
public:
enum Type { foo, bar, quux, baz, fred, barney, xyzzy, plover };
explicit Frobitz(Type in) : m(in) { }
operator Type () const { return Type(m); }
};
HTH,
--Eljay
