Question

Is there a way to (ab)use the C preprocessor to emulate namespaces in C?

I’m thinking something along these lines:

#define NAMESPACE name_of_ns some_function() {     some_other_function(); } 

This would get translated to:

name_of_ns_some_function() {     name_of_ns_some_other_function(); } 

Answer 1

When using namespace prefixes, I normally add macros for the shortened names which can be activated via #define NAMESPACE_SHORT_NAMES before inclusion of the header. A header foobar.h might look like this:

// inclusion guard #ifndef FOOBAR_H_ #define FOOBAR_H_  // long names void foobar_some_func(int); void foobar_other_func();  // short names #ifdef FOOBAR_SHORT_NAMES #define some_func(...) foobar_some_func(__VA_ARGS__) #define other_func(...) foobar_other_func(__VA_ARGS__) #endif  #endif 

If I want to use short names in an including file, I’ll do

#define FOOBAR_SHORT_NAMES #include 'foobar.h' 

I find this a cleaner and more useful solution than using namespace macros as described by Vinko Vrsalovic (in the comments).