While working on Ares you might find the following discussion interesting.

Bellow is a snip from a comment made by Plauger.

>> 2. contrai-wise, namespaces don't seem to be particularly OO or
>> strongly
>> C++ like.
>> 3. adding *anything* to the standard is going make C more complex
>> 4. I think some features of C99 were a step too far and its wide-spread
>> non-adoption indicates other people think the same. (I liked bool  :-)
>> )

> In my opinion, C++-style namespaces could be added to C without too
> much difficulty, and without drastically increasing the complexity of
> the language.

Yes and no. First of all, namespaces are poorly designed in C++ --
they fail to solve most of the problems advanced as justification
for adding namespaces to C++. Second, and IMO more important, they
do nothing to solve the much larger problem in C (and C++) of
controlling the scope of macro definitions. Since C does not have
user-defined overloading of operators or functions, we would at
least avoid the worst problems of namespaces in C++, which are
only partially mitigated by argument-dependent lookup.

>            On the other hand, any additional feature will make the
> language more complex, and the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Indeed. For a time in the early 1990s, I proposed picking up a number
of the "simpler" C++ additions. In the end, the C committee roundly
defeated all such proposals (other than // comments). In hindsight,
I think the committee was absolutely right.

> And of course backward compatibility could also be an issue.  If the
> language were being designed from scratch today with namespaces,
> either the standard library declarations could be in a single
> namespace, or each header could define its own namespace -- but if
> namespaces were added today, existing code that refers directly to
> declarations from the standard headers would still have to work.

We certainly wouldn't want to imitate the disastrous decision in
C++ of putting all existing headers in namespace std.

P.J. Plauger
Dinkumware, Ltd.
http://www.dinkumware.com

link: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thread/64518b74168d8028/e8a8915c6ab6e7bf?hl=en#e8a8915c6ab6e7bf

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