C++ Namespaces, comparison to Java packages

Question

I\'ve done a bunch of Java coding recently and have got used to very specific package naming systems, with deep nesting e.g. com.company.project.db. This works fine

Answer 1

I think there is something missing in the previous answers, and it is one of the reasons I really like C++.

Imagine you are programming a graphical application and suddenly you realize that there is something common among all your widgets. You want all of them to have a new function. What do you do?

1) Edit the base widget class? OK, but most likely you do not have access to it. Maybe there is a licensing problem that prevents you from doing your own modification. Even if you can just do it, if it is something that only makes sense for your project, the authors will not include it in their future release, and upgrading the toolkit will be more painful

2) Create an interface class / multi-inheritance? Depending on your existing code it will be more or less of a pain to update every single class related with a widget. Do this and your code will cost more to maintain because everyone defining a new class must know that they are suppose to inherit from your interface. Becoming dependent of other people discipline is really risky.

The wonderful thing of C++ namespaces here is that you have an extra way to encapsulate stuff within an already existing system. Not only you can encapsulate within already existing libraries that you cannot edit, you can encapsulate similar concepts that you cannot easily insert into your hierarchy of classes/objects.

Java forces you to focus more on a pure OOP design. Sure that I am telling you might be a dirty hack and not elegant, but there are lots of lazy people programming who do not spend time fixing their designs.