Unnamed namespace access rules

Question

I was looking over section 7.3.1.1 in the C++03 standard expecting to find some description of the access rules for items defined in an unnamed namespace.

Answer 1

An anonymous namespace is basically treated as:

namespace unique_per_TU
{
    // Stuff
}
using namespace unique_per_TU;

I'll try to find the reference here in a minute.

EDIT:

It appears you already found it in 7.3.1.1/1

An unnamed namespace definition behaves as if it were replaced by

namespace unique { /* empty body */ }
using namespace unique;
namespace unique { namespacebody }

where all occurrences of unique in a translation unit are replaced by the same identifier and this identifier differs from all other identifiers in the entire program.

The "fake" using already brings the namespace members into the global namespace as you discovered.