Enumerations on PHP

Some good solutions on here!

Here's my version.

• It's strongly typed
• It works with IDE auto-completion
• Enums are defined by a code and a description, where the code can be an integer, a binary value, a short string, or basically anything else you want. The pattern could easily be extended to support orther properties.
• It asupports value (==) and reference (===) comparisons and works in switch statements.

I think the main disadvantage is that enum members do have to be separately declared and instantiated, due to the descriptions and PHP's inability to construct objects at static member declaration time. I guess a way round this might be to use reflection with parsed doc comments instead.

The abstract enum looks like this:

<?php

abstract class AbstractEnum
{
    /** @var array cache of all enum instances by class name and integer value */
    private static $allEnumMembers = array();

    /** @var mixed */
    private $code;

    /** @var string */
    private $description;

    /**
     * Return an enum instance of the concrete type on which this static method is called, assuming an instance
     * exists for the passed in value.  Otherwise an exception is thrown.
     *
     * @param $code
     * @return AbstractEnum
     * @throws Exception
     */
    public static function getByCode($code)
    {
        $concreteMembers = &self::getConcreteMembers();

        if (array_key_exists($code, $concreteMembers)) {
            return $concreteMembers[$code];
        }

        throw new Exception("Value '$code' does not exist for enum '".get_called_class()."'");
    }

    public static function getAllMembers()
    {
        return self::getConcreteMembers();
    }

    /**
     * Create, cache and return an instance of the concrete enum type for the supplied primitive value.
     *
     * @param mixed $code code to uniquely identify this enum
     * @param