Comment by froh

thanks for clarifying.

to all of this I agree:

if the linker doesn't have namespaces (and it doesn't, unlike, say, the Java class loader, or even more extravagant the OSGi bundle loading mechanism), you need to flatten names into one name space. Which means, as you say, name mangling. and that, even without overloading, is a major PITA.

and indeed, not prescribing a prefix and just blocking a useful suffix was also an idea others hopefully took as inspiration how to not do things...

wrt prefixes in the C stdlib, I'd strictly prefer the prefix to be '#define' able, so _if_ you need to move th stdlib to a namespace, #define the prefix before #include-ing the library. needs a statically linked trampoline, though or some other nasty lionk time mechanism. meh. there is a reason languages come with namespaces from the start, these days ...