Declaring an enum within a class

Solution 1:

1. If Color is something that is specific to just Cars then that is the way you would limit its scope. If you are going to have another Color enum that other classes use then you might as well make it global (or at least outside Car).

2. It makes no difference. If there is a global one then the local one is still used anyway as it is closer to the current scope. Note that if you define those function outside of the class definition then you'll need to explicitly specify Car::Color in the function's interface.

Solution 2:

Nowadays - using C++11 - you can use enum class for this:

enum class Color { RED, BLUE, WHITE };

AFAII this does exactly what you want.