[anonymoushn]

Right, if you wanted to have an ordering around, you would use an enum. The enum's values would print as Ace, 2, 3, 4, ..., Jack, Queen, King, and then when you wanted to implement a particular game the game could define the mapping from rank -> set of possible values. You wouldn't want to map each rank to a single value, since in commonly played games aces are worth both 1 and 11 or both 1 and 14.

If you didn't want the ordering (or the compiler warning when your blackjack implementation omits queens), you could use Scala's symbols, which are more or less the same as Clojure's keywords:

  scala> 'king
  res0: Symbol = 'king

[drewhk]

Or use value classes and get the best of both worlds.