Question

I inherited some badly named code and got lucky when I received an third party library that made my life even more complicated. This is what I ended up with.

class Something; // third party library

namespace Something {
  class Something;
  class Templated<class TemplateClass>;
}

Now I need to use the class “Something” from the third party library as the TemplateClass parameter for a new class under namespace Something. I thought this should work

class Something; // third party library

namespace Something {
  class Something;
  class Templated<class TemplateClass>;

  class Impl : public Templated< ::Something > {}
}

But the compiler doesn’t like it. The only way I got it to compile was

class Something; // third party library

class Something2 : public Something {} // dirty hack

namespace Something {
  class Something;
  class Templated<class TemplateClass>;

  class Impl : public Templated< Something2 > {}
}

But I don’t really like it. There must be a better way to do this.

Answer 1

You could use another namespace:

class Something; // third party library

namespace third_party{
  using ::Something;
}

namespace Something {
  class Something;
  class Templated<class TemplateClass>;

  class Impl : public Templated< ::third_party::Something > {}
}

In general, though, I think naming your class and namespace exactly the same is a very bad idea.