C / C++ / MFC

I hate blanket statements like that... Enums should be used for what they are meant for -- enumerations. That is, they should be used when you need to represent a set of values, but don't really care what the values are:

enum ACTION
{
   PRINT,
   PREVIEW,
   EXPORT
};

void DoOutput(const char* OutputDataString, ACTION action)
{
   switch (action)
   {
      case PRINT:
      ...
      break;
      case PREVIEW:
      ...
      break;
      case EXPORT:
      ...
      break;
   }
}

In the example above, it doesn't matter what the values of PRINT, PREVIEW, and EXPORT are, only that they are different. As the other post mentioned, the compiler will perform type checking on this to ensure that only valid values are passed into the function (of course you could use a cast, but you'd never do that right?).

In cases where the value of a constant is actually important, you should use a static const -- not only does this let you be consistent about your constants, since enums are only good for ints anyway, it is also safer, since if the value is important, sooner or later you'll need to convert it from something else, and assigning an int to an enum variable is (i think) undefined (though it usually works). If you need some extra type checking in this case, you're better off using a typedef or even a wrapper class.