A little late, but here’s my answer anyway: What you were looking at was a simple Enum design pattern before they were part of the language. The main reason for avoiding int constants when this class was coded is that it allows some errors to be picked up at compile time, much the same reason why ints are still avoided today. I certainly don’t have any objections to changing it to be a real enum, thanks for updating the code!
Cheers,
Will
theany mis compiler doesn’t pick up mistakes at comp is that the compiler doesn’t pick up errors it up when