Should every class have its own namespace?
- by thehouse
Something that has been troubling me for a while:
The current wisdom is that types should be kept in a namespace that only
contains functions which are part of the type's non-member interface (see C++ Coding Standards Sutter and Alexandrescu or here) to prevent ADL pulling in unrelated definitions.
Does this imply that all classes must have a namespace of their own? If
we assume that a class may be augmented in the future by the addition of
non-member functions, then it can never be safe to put two types in the
same namespace as either one of them may introduce non-member functions
that could interfere with the other.
The reason I ask is that namespaces are becoming cumbersome for me. I'm
writing a header-only library and I find myself using classes names such as
project::component::class_name::class_name. Their implementations call
helper functions but as these can't be in the same namespace they also have
to be fully qualified!
