[Gambas-user] Weird, yet again. Two way access to a collection. (not really a gambas issue)

[Bruce]

This has been bothering me for some years.

It's fairly simple. We have a set of status codes that we use across 
many applications. They are numeric (integer) and have a code (the 
number), a mnemonic (short string) and an "explanation" (i.e. a user 
interpret-able string that describes the status "in full".

Here, there and everywhere within an application we need to set the 
status code of something. Fairly plainly some method returns an integer 
value that reflects the current status. Bing bong. But, in order to do 
that we have to know from memory, when maintaining the code for that 
some method, that "if this happens, then return 617" or whatever. This 
is a pain.

So, I'm trying to come up with some way that I could make a module in a 
library that would let us access the status codes EITHER by the code or 
by the mnemonic.  I can neither get this clear in my mind conceptually 
nor implementation-wise.

(EXAMPLE) Let's say we have an Ice Cream Parlor POS application that is 
loosely connected to the inventory "system". If a situation occurs where 
there is no chocolate ice cream in stock then, when the POS operator 
presses key 4617 (a chocolate ice cream) then it would display 
"Chocolate Ice Creams are out of stock today, offer another flavor". So, 
code 1329 = that explanation, but when I'm coding I'd like to specify 
the status as "NO_CHOC" rather than go search through a bunch of design 
documents and other stuff to find the right status code to use.  I hope 
that makes sense, it's the simplest explanation I can think of. By the 
way, in reality we have around 1600 specific status codes in our 
systems. So I am really hoping that someone has a good idea here.

tia
Bruce