On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 18:01:20 -0400, David Abrahams
My proposal represents a much bigger change to the language,
And even that is questionable. David's proposal isn't so "small" as it may appear at first, IMHO. And the syntax burden is enourmous.
so I'm not sure "fewer costs" would be a reasonable way to characterize it. It's a fairly big hammer to hit the problem with: inside of the new "explicit" namespace you could sneak in any number of brand new and otherwise-incompatible language rules, e.g. allow perl code inside an explicit namespace ;-)
So you'll remove regex?? Seriously, I find that your proposal is well thought out, clear and "natural". Is there anything we can do to claim attention on it? BTW, while reading it I noticed a few typos: * this practice worked reasonably well, and is still being used /effecively/ for preprocessor macros *unlikely to compile correctly if a prefix were /ommitted/ * (possibly) explicit namespace new_std:: Is the :: intended? The fact that the paper hasn't had much consideration surprises me.
From what I've come to know from electronic contacts with them, I guess Bjarne and Peter Dimov, just to cite two, would be quite favourable to it.
BTW, have you considered something like mutable swap using mutable swap; for unqualified using-declarations? I find the second quite expressive. --Gennaro.