are C functions declared in headers guaranteed to be in the global namespace as well as std?

Question

So this is something that I\'ve always wondered but was never quite sure about. So it is strictly a matter of curiosity, not a real problem.

As far as I understand,

Answer 1

At the present time, no. In fact, even though the code will work with every compiler I now of, it's really not supposed to work at all -- #includeing one of the c* headers is only supposed to give you access to the names inside of namespace std.

Since implementation of this was such a pain (getting it right essentially required duplicating the entire C library as a C++ library in the right namespace), in C++ 0x they've changed the requirements a bit -- your code is now allowed to work, though (at least if memory serves) it's still not required to work.