Re: Why are people so afraid of globals?

[David Manura <dm.lua@...>]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Antonio Vieiro <antonio@antonioshome.net> wrote:
>... C has no namespaces and there's no problem in
> building large applications on top of it, right?

The problems with C header files [1] are well known, and newer
variants like Java/C#/D do not repeat it.  windows.h, for example, is
prone to some annoying name conflicts [2].  Design patterns have been
devised to reduce these problems sufficiently to make large
application development do-able.  Modern C++ development does use
namespaces [3], although this does not replace header files.  Even C
has "static" internal linkage, a type of private namespace, and a
convention is to prefix globals by the library name (e.g. "lua_") and
hope it is unique.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Header_file
[2] http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2010-01/msg00428.html
[3] http://winterdom.com/dev/cpp/nspaces