Jeffrey Bush wrote:

...

I have also offered a class for doing this as well, although it didn't draw the interest that this one did. Here was my attempt at it with a test/example class: https://gist.github.com/coderforlife/6d8bac451d49dd1a0c81

Looks good to me, and seems to be quite close to what I aim at.

But the definition seems very user unfriendly. Is it correct that

you always have to declare enums in the public namespace?

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Felix

Sorry for the delayed response. It does support being in a public namespace, even as a sub-class. However the definition does get uglier in sub-classes. The major problem I ran into was that the class could not be defined in a header file without getting multiple-definition or as a sub-class without running into problems. Mainly because of the constant arrays in the classes couldn't be defined in-line and in headers. Some C++11 features may help get around this. I do think that when these issues are ignored the declarations are pretty nice: BOOST_FLAGS_WITH_VALUES(MyFlags, std::uint8_t, A, 1, B, 2, AB, 3, C, 4); BOOST_FLAGS(MyDefaultFlags, AX, BX, CX, DX, EX, FX, GX, HX); namespace MyNS { BOOST_FLAGS(MyFlags, M, N, O, P, Q); } That makes 3 different enumerations, first with custom values and a custom base (uint8_t), the second with default values (powers of two) and selects the smallest base type, and the third is the same but in a non-public-namespace. All of these don't work in header files without getting multiple definitions. To avoid that problem you can do something like: // In H file: BOOST_FLAGS_DECL(MyFlags, M, N, O, P, Q); // In CPP file: BOOST_FLAGS_DEFN(MyFlags, M, N, O, P, Q); The same technique can be used to make sub-classes (as in the example file). If I remember correctly if the ability to go from string -> value and get list of values at runtime then the ugliness of the separate DECL/DEFN would be avoided. Jeff