Can enums be subclassed to add new elements?

Question

I want to take an existing enum and add more elements to it as follows:

enum A {a,b,c}

enum B extends A {d}

/*B is {a,b,c,d}*/

Is this po

Answer 1

Enums represent a complete enumeration of possible values. So the (unhelpful) answer is no.

As an example of a real problem take weekdays, weekend days and, the union, days of week. We could define all days within days-of-week but then we would not be able to represent properties special to either weekdays and weekend-days.

What we could do, is have three enum types with a mapping between weekdays/weekend-days and days-of-week.

public enum Weekday {
    MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI;
    public DayOfWeek toDayOfWeek() { ... }
}
public enum WeekendDay {
    SAT, SUN;
    public DayOfWeek toDayOfWeek() { ... }
}
public enum DayOfWeek {
    MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI, SAT, SUN;
}

Alternatively, we could have an open-ended interface for day-of-week:

interface Day {
    ...
}
public enum Weekday implements Day {
    MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI;
}
public enum WeekendDay implements Day {
    SAT, SUN;
}

Or we could combine the two approaches:

interface Day {
    ...
}
public enum Weekday implements Day {
    MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI;
    public DayOfWeek toDayOfWeek() { ... }
}
public enum WeekendDay implements Day {
    SAT, SUN;
    public DayOfWeek toDayOfWeek() { ... }
}
public enum DayOfWeek {
    MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI, SAT, SUN;
    public Day toDay() { ... }
}