[kragen]

I think it depends on a lot more of the circumstances than this. For example, in many languages, you can intern the strings so that a string equality test is just a single machine instruction. And if these color representations are crossing some interface that needs to be kept stable, it's a lot easier to add new colors if what's crossing is "red" or "#ff0000" than if it's "2". And it may be that what you're doing with the colors is just generating HTML, rather than doing multi-way switches, in which case the enum implementation has no advantage over the string representation; it just increases code duplication.

The probably more important consideration is that with an enum, your compiler can catch misspellings. Depending on your runtime environment, this can be a huge killer advantage. In particular, if your runtime environment can't do much beyond blink an LED to report errors, compile-time checking is really really important.

[robomartin]

I think we are slicing this a little too thin. My original point is that it is important to understand that the choices made when representing data can be important. My off-the-hip example was not meant to be definitive.