switch (expression)

[Robert Lenoil]

More basic than pointers, how about allowing other arithmetic types in switch
statements?  It's really inefficient to do int comparisons when the actual
thing you're CASEing on is a byte.  I think that the type of the case labels
should be whatever the type of the switch expression; thus if I say "switch
(foo)" where foo is a char, all the case statements are cast to char.

On a similar note, it annoys me that enums can only be int-valued, when 99%
of the time they'll fit in a char.  On memory-tight code, this causes me to
use #defines instead of enums, so that I can use a byte instead of an int.
The same goes for bitfields.  I'd change the enum syntax to "enum type {...}",
where type is optional (and defaults to int), but can be any numeric type.
Similarly, I should be able to use any integer type in a bitfield definition.

Robert Lenoil
Apple Computer, Inc.