questions about name mangling in C++

Question

I am trying to learn and understand name mangling in C++. Here are some questions:

(1) From devx

When a global function is overloaded, the gen

Answer 1

Mangling is simply how the compiler keeps the linker happy.

In C, you can't have two functions with the same name, no matter what. So that's what the linker was written to assume: unique names. (You can have static functions in different compilation units, because their names aren't of interest to the linker.)

In C++, you can have two functions with the same name as long as they have different parameter types. So C++ combines the function name with the types in some way. That way the linker sees them as having different names.

The exact manner of mangling is not significant to the programmer, only the compiler, and in fact every compiler does it differently. All that matters is that every function with the same base name is somehow made unique for the linker.

You can see now that adding namespaces and templates to the mix keeps extending the principle.