Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
In C++, should we be prepending stuff in the global namespace with ::?
For example, when using WinAPI, which is in C, should I do ::HANDLE instead of HANDLE, and ::LoadLibrary instead of LoadLibrary? What does C++ say about this? Is it generally a good idea, factoring in issues like readability and maintainability?
As namespaces don’t exists in C, don’t use ::HANDLE to access HANDLE type.
Using the prepending :: for global namespace is a good idea for readability, you know the type you want to access is from global namespace.
Moreover, if you are in a nested namespace and declare your own HANDLE type (for example), then the compiler will use this one instead of windows.h one!
Thus, always prefer using :: before names when working in nested namespace.