When to use “::” for global scope in C++?

Question

Every once in a while, I stumble across some code that I\'m maintaining that challenges the way I think about my code style. Today was one of those days...

I\'m awa

Answer 1

I use it quite infrequently; only when some ambiguity needs resolving for whatever reason. This is pretty subjective, though.

There may be some occasions (say, inside a template) where you're worried about ADL causing ambiguities only in certain cases:

template 
void foo(T t)
{
   ::bar(t);  // :: just in case there's a `bar` in `T`'s namespace
}