I’d read about enum class in C++. It’s a slight strengthening of the compiler checking compared to plain old enums.  Why you may wonder? Well,

• Conventional enums can implicitly convert to int, causing errors when someone does not want an enumeration to act as an integer.
• Conventional enums export their enumerators to the surrounding scope, causing name space pollution.
• The underlying type of an enum cannot be specified, causing confusion, compatibility problems, and makes forward declaration impossible.

Additionally you can declare the underlying storage type, which lets the compiler catch bugs where a value is too large for the storage. Here’s a made up example to show this:

enum class byteThings : unsigned char {
Thing1 = 0x01,
Thing2 = 0x02,
Thing3 = 0x04,
BigThing = 0x120  // Compiler will complain!
}

The downside is that to get the int value, you now need to do a static cast but it does make your code safer.

byteThings b = Thing2; 
int i= static_cast(thing); // 2