edam wrote:
Hi there,
I just wanted to hear the boost community's thoughts on abbreviating boost's namespaces. According to Boost's library naming conventions (http://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html#Naming_consistency) this is strongly discouraged, and with good reason -- having clearly (and consistently) named namespaces is a good thing! Having used boost for a (mere) couple of years now, though, I've started to find its namespaces a bit unwieldy.
<snip> What I'm proposing sounds terrible, I know, but if you consider that users would "opt-in" to this by including the abbreviations header (meaning it wouldn't affect existing users), I wondered if there would be any merit in it? I'm expecting a lot disapproval to this idea, but I thought I'd ask what people think anyway. Please don't shoot me down too much -- this is my first post to the boost mailing list! :o)
I don't see the point. I can type namespace fs = boost::filesystem; at most points of the source file and suddenly I have a very handy fs shortcut for that big, ugly namespace. I think having a special header for this is overkill. And "bst" is just ugly. Sebastian