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

In C++, the basic unit of design and implementation is the class, not the namespace. Namespaces were intended as a means of preventing name clashes in large libraries, not for expressing concepts.

Classes have several advantages over namespaces:

• they can have constructors and destructors
• they can have private members
• they cannot be re-opened

However, I would look twice at any deeply nested relationship. That is really not a good way of designing software, and leads to unreadable code, whether you juse classes or namespaces.