Why is using namespace std considered bad practice

Question

I ve been told by others that writing using namespace std  in code is wrong  and that I should use std  cout and std  cin directly instead   Why is using namespace std  considered a bad practice  Is it inefficient or does it risk declaring ambiguous variables  variables that share the same name as a function in std namespace   Does it impact performance

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You need to be able to read code written by people who have different style and best practices opinions than you.
If you're only using cout, nobody gets confused. But when you have lots of namespaces flying around and you see this class and you aren't exactly sure what it does, having the namespace explicit acts as a comment of sorts. You can see at first glance, "oh, this is a filesystem operation" or "that's doing network stuff".

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Yes  the namespace is important  Once in my project  I needed to import one var declaration into my source code  but when compiling it  it conflicted with another third-party library   At the end  I had to work around around it by some other means and make the code less clear

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I agree with the others here  but I would like to address the concerns regarding readability - you can avoid all of that by simply using typedefs at the top of your file  function or class declaration   I usually use it in my class declaration as methods in a class tend to deal with similar data types  the members  and a typedef is an opportunity to assign a name that is meaningful in the context of the class  This actually aids readability in the definitions of the class methods      Header class File      typedef std  vector lt std  string gt  Lines     Lines ReadLines        and in the implementation       cpp Lines File  ReadLines         Lines lines         Get them        return lines      as opposed to       cpp vector lt string gt  File  ReadLines         vector lt string gt  lines         Get them        return lines      or       cpp std  vector lt std  string gt  File  ReadLines         std  vector lt std  string gt  lines         Get them        return lines

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Do not use it globally  It is considered  bad  only when used globally  Because    You clutter the namespace you are programming in  Readers will have difficulty seeing where a particular identifier comes from  when you use many using namespace xyz  Whatever is true for other readers of your source code is even more true for the most frequent reader of it  yourself  Come back in a year or two and take a look    If you only talk about using namespace std you might not be aware of all the stuff you grab -- and when you add another  include or move to a new C   revision you might get name conflicts you were not aware of    You may use it locally  Go ahead and use it locally  almost  freely  This  of course  prevents you from repetition of std   -- and repetition is also bad   An idiom for using it locally  In C  03 there was an idiom -- boilerplate code -- for implementing a swap function for your classes  It was suggested that you actually use a local using namespace std -- or at least using std  swap   class Thing       int    value       Child  child   public                 friend void swap Thing  amp a  Thing  amp b      void swap Thing  amp a  Thing  amp b        using namespace std          make  std  swap  available        swap all members     swap a value   b value        std  stwap int  int       swap a child   b child        swap Child amp  Child amp    or  std  swap           This does the following magic    The compiler will choose the std  swap for value   i e  void std  swap int  int   If you have an overload void swap Child amp   Child amp   implemented the compiler will choose it  If you do not have that overload the compiler will use void std  swap Child amp  Child amp   and try its best swapping these    With C  11 there is no reason to use this pattern any more  The implementation of std  swap was changed to find a potential overload and choose it

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It s case by case  We want to minimize the  total cost of ownership  of the software over its lifespan  Stating  using namespace std  has some costs  but not using it also has a cost in legibility   People correctly point out that when using it  when the standard library introduces new symbols and definitions  your code ceases to compile  and you may be forced to rename variables  And yet this is probably good long-term  since future maintainers will be momentarily confused or distracted if you re using a keyword for some surprising purpose   You don t want to have a template called vector  say  which isn t the vector known by everyone else  And the number of new definitions thus introduced in the C   library is small enough it may simply not come up   There is a cost to having to do this kind of change  but the cost is not high and is offset by the clarity gained by not using std symbol names for other purposes   Given the number of classes  variables  and functions  stating std   on every one might fluff up your code by 50  and make it harder to get your head around  An algorithm or step in a method that could be taken in on one screenful of code now requires scrolling back and forth to follow  This is a real cost  Arguably it may not be a high cost  but people who deny it even exists are inexperienced  dogmatic  or simply wrong   I d offer the following rules    std is different from all other libraries  It is the one library everyone basically needs to know  and in my view is best thought of as part of the language   Generally speaking there is an excellent case for using namespace std even if there isn t for other libraries  Never force the decision onto the author of a compilation unit  a  cpp file  by putting this using in a header  Always defer the decision to the compilation unit author  Even in a project that has decided to use using namespace std everywhere may fine a few modules that are best handled as exceptions to that rule  Even though the namespace feature lets you have many modules with symbols defined the same  it s going to be confusing to do so  Keep the names different to the extent possible  Even if not using the namespace feature  if you have a class named foo and std introduces a class named foo  it s probably better long-run to rename your class anyway  An alternative to using namespaces is to manually namespace symbols by prefixing them  I have two libraries I ve used for decades  both starting as C libraries  actually  where every symbol is prefixed with  AK  or  SCWin   Generally speaking  this is like avoiding the  using  construct  but you don t write the twin colons  AK  foo   is instead AKFoo    It makes code 5-10  denser and less verbose  and the only downside is that you ll be in big trouble if you have to use two such libraries that have the same prefixing   Note the X Window libraries are excellent in this regard  except they forgot to do so with a few  defines  TRUE and FALSE should have been XTRUE and XFALSE  and this set up a namespace clash with Sybase or Oracle that likewise used TRUE and FALSE with different values   ASCII 0 and 1 in the case of the database   One special advantage of this is that it applies seemlessly to preprocessor definitions  whereas the C   using namespace system doesn t handle them  A nice benefit of this is that it gives an organic slope from being part of a project to eventually being a library   In a large application of mine  all window classes are prefixed Win  all signal-processing modules Mod  and so on   There s little chance of any of these being reused so there s no practical benefit to making each group into a library  but it makes obvious in a few seconds how the project breaks into sub-projects

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I do not think it is necessarily bad practice under all conditions  but you need to be careful when you use it   If you re writing a library  you probably should use the scope resolution operators with the namespace to keep your library from butting heads with other libraries   For application level code  I don t see anything wrong with it

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Here is an example showing how using namespace std  can lead to name clash problems   Unable to define a global variable in C    In the example a very generic algorithm name  std  count  name clashes with a very reasonable variable name  count

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This is not related to performance at all  But consider this  you are using two libraries called Foo and Bar   using namespace foo  using namespace bar    Everything works fine  and you can call Blah   from Foo and Quux   from Bar without problems  But one day you upgrade to a new version of Foo 2 0  which now offers a function called Quux    Now you ve got a conflict  Both Foo 2 0 and Bar import Quux   into your global namespace  This is going to take some effort to fix  especially if the function parameters happen to match   If you had used foo  Blah   and bar  Quux    then the introduction of foo  Quux   would have been a non-event

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I agree with everything Greg wrote  but I d like to add  It can even get worse than Greg said   Library Foo 2 0 could introduce a function  Quux    that is an unambiguously better match for some of your calls to Quux   than the bar  Quux   your code called for years  Then your code still compiles  but it silently calls the wrong function and does god-knows-what  That s about as bad as things can get   Keep in mind that the std namespace has tons of identifiers  many of which are very common ones  think list  sort  string  iterator  etc   which are very likely to appear in other code  too   If you consider this unlikely  There was a question asked here on Stack Overflow where pretty much exactly this happened  wrong function called due to omitted std   prefix  about half a year after I gave this answer  Here is another  more recent example of such a question  So this is a real problem     Here s one more data point  Many  many years ago  I also used to find it annoying having to prefix everything from the standard library with std    Then I worked in a project where it was decided at the start that both using directives and declarations are banned except for function scopes  Guess what  It took most of us very few weeks to get used to writing the prefix  and after a few more weeks most of us even agreed that it actually made the code more readable  There s a reason for that  Whether you like shorter or longer prose is subjective  but the prefixes objectively add clarity to the code  Not only the compiler  but you  too  find it easier to see which identifier is referred to   In a decade  that project grew to have several million lines of code  Since these discussions come up again and again  I once was curious how often the  allowed  function-scope using actually was used in the project  I grep d the sources for it and only found one or two dozen places where it was used  To me this indicates that  once tried  developers don t find std   painful enough to employ using directives even once every 100 kLoC even where it was allowed to be used     Bottom line  Explicitly prefixing everything doesn t do any harm  takes very little getting used to  and has objective advantages  In particular  it makes the code easier to interpret by the compiler and by human readers     and that should probably be the main goal when writing code

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I agree that it should not be used globally  but it s not so evil to use locally  like in a namespace  Here s an example from  The C   Programming Language    namespace My lib        using namespace His lib     Everything from His lib     using namespace Her lib     Everything from Her lib      using His lib  String     Resolve potential clash in favor of His lib     using Her lib  Vector     Resolve potential clash in favor of Her lib      In this example  we resolved potential name clashes and ambiguities arising from their composition   Names explicitly declared there  including names declared by using-declarations like His lib  String  take priority over names made accessible in another scope by a using-directive  using namespace Her lib

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This is a bad practice  often known as global namespace pollution  Problems may occur when more than one namespace has the same function name with signature  then it will be ambiguous for the compiler to decide which one to call and this all can be avoided when you are specifying the namespace with your function call like std  cout   Hope this helps

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To be honest  for me  that s like discussing the number of spaces for indentation   Using directives in headers cause damage  But in C   files  Maybe if you use two namespaces at once  But if you use one  it s more about style than real efficiency   Do you know why threads about indentation are so popular  Anyone can say something about it and sound very smart and experienced

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One shouldn t use the using directive at the global scope  especially in headers  However  there are situations where it is appropriate even in a header file   template  lt typename FloatType gt  inline FloatType compute something FloatType x        using namespace std     No problem since scope is limited     return exp x     sin x  - cos x   2    sin x   3  - cos x   4        This is better than explicit qualification  std  sin  std  cos      because it is shorter and has the ability to work with user defined floating point types  via argument-dependent lookup  ADL

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Short version  don t use global using declarations or directives in header files  Feel free to use them in implementation files  Here s what Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu have to say about this issue in C   Coding Standards  bolding for emphasis is mine    Summary Namespace usings are for your convenience  not for you to inflict on others  Never write a using declaration or a using directive before an  include directive  Corollary  In header files  don   t write namespace-level using directives or using declarations  instead  explicitly namespace-qualify all names   The second rule follows from the first  because headers can never know what other header  includes might appear after them   Discussion In short  You can and should use namespace using declarations and directives liberally in your implementation files after  include directives and feel good about it  Despite repeated assertions to the contrary  namespace using declarations and directives are not evil and they do not defeat the purpose of namespaces  Rather  they are what make namespaces usable

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Here s a point of view I haven t found in any of the other answers  use only one namespace  The main reason why namespaces are bad  according to most of the answers  is that you can have conflicting function names which can result in a total mess  However  this won t occur if you use only one namespace  Decide which library it is that you will use the most  maybe using namespace std   and stick with it   One can think of it as having an invisible library prefix - std  vector becomes just vector  This  in my opinion  is the best of both worlds  on one hand it reduces the amount of typing you have to do  as intended by namespaces  and on the other  it still requires you to use the prefixes for clarity and security  If there s a function or object without a namespace prefix - you know it s from the one namespace you declared   Just remember that if you will decide to use one globally - don t use others locally  This comes back to the other answers that local namespaces are often more useful than global ones since they provide variety in convenience

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Another reason is surprise   If I see cout  lt  lt  blah  instead of std  cout  lt  lt  blah I think  What is this cout  Is it the normal cout  Is it something special

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There s a very simple answer  it s defensive programming  You know that the uses of std  size t  std  cout  etc   could be made a little easier with using namespace std  - I hope you don t need to be convinced that such a directive has no place in a header  Within a translation unit  however  you might be tempted     The types  classes  etc   that are part of the std namespace increase with each C   revision  There are too many potential ambiguities if you relax the std   qualifier  It is entirely reasonable to relax the qualifier for names within std that you will be using frequently  e g   using std  fprintf   or more probably  something like  using std  size t  - but unless these are already well-understood parts of the language  or specifically  the std wrapping of the C library   just use the qualifier   When you can use typedef  combined with auto and decltype inferencing  there s really nothing to be gained from a readability   maintainability perspective

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An example where using namespace std throws a compilation error because of the ambiguity of count  which is also a function in algorithm library   include  lt iostream gt   include  lt algorithm gt   using namespace std   int count   1  int main         cout  lt  lt  count  lt  lt  endl

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Using many namespaces at the same time is obviously a recipe for disaster  but using JUST namespace std and only namespace std is not that big of a deal in my opinion because redefinition can only occur by your own code      So just consider them functions as reserved names like  int  or  class  and that is it   People should stop being so anal about it  Your teacher was right all along  Just use ONE namespace  that is the whole point of using namespaces the first place  You are not supposed to use more than one at the same time  Unless it is your own  So again  redefinition will not happen

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I also consider it a bad practice  Why  Just one day I thought that the function of a namespace is to divide stuff  so I shouldn t spoil it with throwing everything into one global bag   However  if I often use  cout  and  cin   I write  using std  cout  using std  cin  in the  cpp file  never in the header file as it propagates with  include   I think that no one sane will ever name a stream cout or cin

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From my experiences  if you have multiple libraries that uses say  cout  but for a different purpose you may use the wrong cout   For example  if I type in  using namespace std  and using namespace otherlib  and type just cout  which happens to be in both   rather than std  cout  or  otherlib  cout    you might use the wrong one  and get errors  It s much more effective and efficient to use std  cout

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It depends on where it is located  If it is a common header  then you are diminishing the value of the namespace by merging it into the global namespace  Keep in mind  this could be a neat way of making module globals

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It doesn t make your software or project performance worse  The inclusion of the namespace at the beginning of your source code isn t bad  The inclusion of the using namespace std instruction varies according to your needs and the way you are developing the software or project   The namespace std contains the C   standard functions and variables  This namespace is useful when you often would use the C   standard functions      As is mentioned in this page       The statement using namespace std is generally considered bad   practice  The alternative to this statement is to specify the   namespace to which the identifier belongs using the scope operator       each time we declare a type       And see this opinion       There is no problem using  using namespace std  in your source file   when you make heavy use of the namespace and know for sure that   nothing will collide    Some people had said that is a bad practice to include the using namespace std in your source files because you re invoking from that namespace all the functions and variables  When you would like to define a new function with the same name as another function contained in the namespace std you would overload the function and it could produce problems due to compile or execute  It will not compile or executing as you expect      As is mentioned in this page       Although the statement saves us from typing std   whenever   we wish to access a class or type defined in the std namespace  it   imports the entirety of the std namespace into the current namespace   of the program  Let us take a few examples to understand why this   might not be such a good thing               Now at a later stage of development  we wish to use another version of   cout that is custom implemented in some library called    foo     for   example                Notice how there is an ambiguity  to which library does cout point to    The compiler may detect this and not compile the program  In the worst   case  the program may still compile but call the wrong function  since   we never specified to which namespace the identifier belonged

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The problem with putting using namespace in the header files of your classes is that it forces anyone who wants to use your classes  by including your header files  to also be  using   i e  seeing everything in  those other namespaces   However  you may feel free to put a using statement in your  private    cpp files     Beware that some people disagree with my saying  feel free  like this -- because although a using statement in a cpp file is better than in a header  because it doesn t affect people who include your header file   they think it s still not good  because depending on the code it could make the implementation of the class more difficult to maintain   This C   Super-FAQ entry says      The using-directive exists for legacy C   code and to ease the transition to namespaces  but you probably shouldn   t use it on a regular basis  at least not in your new C   code    The FAQ suggests two alternatives    A using-declaration   using std  cout     a using-declaration lets you use cout without qualification cout  lt  lt   Values     Just typing std    std  cout  lt  lt   Values

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Why is  using namespace std   considered a bad practice in C      I put it the other way around  Why is typing five extra characters considered cumbersome by some   Consider e g  writing a piece of numerical software  Why would I even consider polluting my global namespace by cutting general  std  vector  down to  vector  when  vector  is one of the problem domain s most important concepts

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I agree with others     it is asking for name clashes  ambiguities and then the fact is it is less explicit  While I can see the use of using  my personal preference is to limit it  I would also strongly consider what some others pointed out   If you want to find a function name that might be a fairly common name  but you only want to find it in the std namespace  or the reverse     you want to change all calls that are not in namespace std  namespace X        then how do you propose to do this   You could write a program to do it  but wouldn t it be better to spend time working on your project itself rather than writing a program to maintain your project   Personally  I actually don t mind the std   prefix  I like the look more than not having it  I don t know if that is because it is explicit and says to me  this isn t my code    I am using the standard library  or if it is something else  but I think it looks nicer  This might be odd given that I only recently got into C    used and still do C and other languages for much longer and C is my favourite language of all time  right above assembly    There is one other thing although it is somewhat related to the above and what others point out  While this might be bad practise  I sometimes reserve std  name for the standard library version and name for program-specific implementation  Yes  indeed this could bite you and bite you hard  but it all comes down to that I started this project from scratch  and I m the only programmer for it  Example  I overload std  string and call it string  I have helpful additions  I did it in part because of my C and Unix    Linux  tendency towards lower-case names   Besides that  you can have namespace aliases  Here is an example of where it is useful that might not have been referred to  I use the C  11 standard and specifically with libstdc    Well  it doesn t have complete std  regex support  Sure  it compiles  but it throws an exception along the lines of it being an error on the programmer s end  But it is lack of implementation   So here s how I solved it  Install Boost s regex  and link it in  Then  I do the following so that when libstdc   has it implemented entirely  I need only remove this block and the code remains the same   namespace std       using boost  regex      using boost  regex error      using boost  regex replace      using boost  regex search      using boost  regex match      using boost  smatch      namespace regex constants   boost  regex constants      I won t argue on whether that is a bad idea or not  I will however argue that it keeps it clean for my project and at the same time makes it specific  True  I have to use Boost  but I m using it like the libstdc   will eventually have it  Yes  starting your own project and starting with a standard       at the very beginning goes a very long way with helping maintenance  development and everything involved with the project   Just to clarify something  I don t actually think it is a good idea to use a name of a class whatever in the STL deliberately and more specifically in place of  The string is the exception  ignore the first  above  or second here  pun if you must  for me as I didn t like the idea of  String    As it is  I am still very biased towards C and biased against C    Sparing details  much of what I work on fits C more  but it was a good exercise and a good way to make myself a  learn another language and b  try not be less biased against object classes etc which is maybe better stated as less closed-minded  less arrogant  and more accepting    But what is useful is what some already suggested  I do indeed use list  it is fairly generic  is it not     and sort  same thing  to name two that would cause a name clash if I were to do using namespace std   and so to that end I prefer being specific  in control and knowing that if I intend it to be the standard use then I will have to specify it  Put simply  no assuming allowed   And as for making Boost s regex part of std  I do that for future integration and     again  I admit fully this is bias - I don t think it is as ugly as boost  regex        Indeed  that is another thing for me  There are many things in C   that I still have yet to come to fully accept in looks and methods  another example  variadic templates versus var arguments  though I admit variadic templates are very very useful     Even those that I do accept it was difficult  and I still have issues with them

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include  lt iostream gt   using namespace std   int main          There used to be      int left  right       But not anymore    if  left    right      std  cout  lt  lt   quot Excuse me  WHAT   n quot      So  why  Because it brings in identifiers that overlap commonly used variable names  and lets this code compile  interpreting it to mean if  std  left    std  right   PVS-Studio can find such an error using the V1058 diagnostic  https   godbolt org z YZTwhp  thank you Andrey Karpov     Pinging cppcheck developers  you might wish to flag this one  It was a doozy

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It s nice to see code and know what it does  If I see std  cout I know that s the cout stream of the std library  If I see cout then I don t know  It could be the cout stream of the std library  Or there could be an int cout   0  ten lines higher in the same function  Or a static variable named cout in that file  It could be anything    Now take a million line code base  which isn t particularly big  and you re searching for a bug  which means you know there is one line in this one million lines that doesn t do what it is supposed to do  cout  lt  lt  1  could read a static int named cout  shift it to the left by one bit  and throw away the result  Looking for a bug  I d have to check that  Can you see how I really really prefer to see std  cout   It s one of these things that seem a really good idea if you are a teacher and never had to write and maintain any code for a living  I love seeing code where  1  I know what it does  and   2  I m confident that the person writing it knew what it does

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With unqualified imported identifiers you need external search tools like grep to find out where identifiers are declared  This makes reasoning about program correctness harder

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I recently ran into a complaint about Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010  It turned out that pretty much all the source files had these two lines   using namespace std  using namespace boost    A lot of Boost features are going into the C  0x standard  and Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2010 has a lot of C  0x features  so suddenly these programs were not compiling   Therefore  avoiding using namespace X  is a form of future-proofing  a way of making sure a change to the libraries and or header files in use is not going to break a program

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To answer your question I look at it this way practically   a lot of programmers  not all  invoke namespace std   Therefore one should be in the habit of NOT using things that impinge or use the same names as what is in the namespace std   That is a great deal granted  but not so much compared to the number of possible coherent words and pseudonyms that can be come up with strictly speaking   I mean really    saying  don t rely on this being present  is just setting you up to rely on it NOT being present   You are constantly going to have issues borrowing code snippets and constantly repairing them   Just keep your user-defined and borrowed stuff in limited scope as they should be and be VERY sparing with globals  honestly globals should almost always be a last resort for purposes of  compile now  sanity later    Truly I think it is bad advice from your teacher because using std will work for both  cout  and  std  cout  but NOT using std will only work for  std  cout    You will not always be fortunate enough to write all your own code   NOTE  Don t focus too much on efficiency issues until you actually learn a little about how compilers work   With a little experience coding you don t have to learn that much about them before you realize how much they are able to generalize good code into something something simple   Every bit as simple as if you wrote the whole thing in C   Good code is only as complex as it needs to be

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Experienced programmers use whatever solves their problems and avoid whatever creates new problems  and they avoid header-file-level using-directives for this exact reason   Experienced programmers also try to avoid full qualification of names inside their source files  A minor reason for this is that it s not elegant to write more code when less code is sufficient unless there are good reasons  A major reason for this is turning off argument-dependent lookup  ADL    What are these good reasons  Sometimes programmers explicitly want to turn off ADL  other times they want to disambiguate   So the following are OK    Function-level using-directives and using-declarations inside functions  implementations Source-file-level using-declarations inside source files  Sometimes  source-file-level using-directives

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It s all about managing complexity  Using the namespace will pull things in that you don t want  and thus possibly make it harder to debug  I say possibly   Using std   all over the place is harder to read  more text and all that    Horses for courses - manage your complexity how you best can and feel able

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I think using locally or globally should depend on the application   Because  when we use the library locally  sometimes the code is going to be a real mess  Readability is going to low   So  we should use libraries locally only when there is a possibility for conflicts   I am not a more experienced person  So  let me know if I am wrong

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Namespaces are to avoid naming conflicts  C   is based on C and C has many problems with function and variable names because sometimes functions from different library clashes  So library developer started to prefix their functions with library names like the following  foo foo h  void libfoo foo foo h open       the name can be weird then even this one   C   introduced namespace to solve this problem in an easy way  Assume you have two libraries named file and window which handles files and windows respectively and the following code   include  lt file h gt   include  lt window h gt   using namespace file  using namespace window   void open                 file h  namespace file       void open       What     window h  namespace window       void open       Oh no     The above code will surely and certainly fail to compile  If you don t like type std    only 5 characters  you can always do this   not a good idea in header files  using s   std   If you still want to use using namespace std  in your source file then you are inviting that problem and I have to ask you  quot What is the PURPOSE of a NAMESPACE  quot

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Consider     myHeader h  include  lt sstream gt  using namespace std       someoneElses cpp h  include  myHeader h   class stringstream       Uh oh      Note that this is a simple example  If you have files with 20 includes and other imports  you ll have a ton of dependencies to go through to figure out the problem  The worse thing about it is that you can get unrelated errors in other modules depending on the definitions that conflict   It s not horrible  but you ll save yourself headaches by not using it in header files or the global namespace  It s probably all right to do it in very limited scopes  but I ve never had a problem typing the extra five characters to clarify where my functions are coming from

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A namespace is a named scope  Namespaces are used to group related declarations and to keep separate items separate  For example  two separately developed libraries may use the same name to refer to different items  but a user can still use both   namespace Mylib      template lt class T gt  class Stack                             namespace Yourlib      class Stack                             void f int max        Mylib  Stack lt int gt  s1 max      Use my stack     Yourlib  Stack    s2 max      Use your stack                Repeating a namespace name can be a distraction for both readers and writers  Consequently  it is possible to state that names from a particular namespace are available without explicit qualification  For example   void f int max        using namespace Mylib     Make names from Mylib accessible     Stack lt int gt  s1 max      Use my stack     Yourlib  Stack s2 max      Use your stack                Namespaces provide a powerful tool for the management of different libraries and of different versions of code  In particular  they offer the programmer alternatives of how explicit to make a reference to a nonlocal name   Source  An Overview of the C   Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup

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A concrete example to clarify the concern  Imagine you have a situation where you have two libraries  foo and bar  each with their own namespace   namespace foo       void a float       Does something         namespace bar               Now let s say you use foo and bar together in your own program as follows   using namespace foo  using namespace bar   void main         a 42       At this point everything is fine  When you run your program it  Does something   But later you update bar and let s say it has changed to be like   namespace bar       void a float       Does something completely different          At this point you ll get a compiler error   using namespace foo  using namespace bar   void main         a 42       error  call to  a  is ambiguous  should be foo  a 42      So you ll need to do some maintenance to clarify that  a  meant foo  a  That s undesirable  but fortunately it is pretty easy  just add foo   in front of all calls to a that the compiler marks as ambiguous    But imagine an alternative scenario where bar changed instead to look like this instead   namespace bar       void a int       Does something completely different          At this point your call to a 42  suddenly binds to bar  a instead of foo  a and instead of doing  something  it does  something completely different    No compiler warning or anything  Your program just silently starts doing something complete different than before   When you use a namespace you re risking a scenario like this  which is why people are uncomfortable using namespaces  The more things in a namespace  the greater the risk of conflict  so people might be even more uncomfortable using namespace std  due to the number of things in that namespace  than other namespaces   Ultimately this is a trade-off between writability vs  reliability maintainability  Readability may factor in also  but I could see arguments for that going either way  Normally I would say reliability and maintainability are more important  but in this case you ll constantly pay the writability cost for an fairly rare reliability maintainability impact  The  best  trade-off will determine on your project and your priorities

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If you import the right header files you suddenly have names like hex  left  plus or count in your global scope  This might be surprising if you are not aware that std   contains these names  If you also try to use these names locally it can lead to quite some confusion   If all the standard stuff is in its own namespace you don t have to worry about name collisions with your code or other libraries

[c++] Why is "using namespace std;" considered bad practice?

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