Re: Word For Today: “Uglification”

On 12/03/2024 15:09, Anton Shepelev wrote:

bart:

Anton Shepelev:

David Brown:
>

The limited support for avoiding name clashes in C
(user-level C, outside of the implementation
internals) is certainly something that he (or others)
/could/ complain about.  It is a well-known issue, and
it's a shame that the C standards committee have never
dealt with it.  I don't see why the language could not
adopt a simple "namespace" solution that would hugely
simplify avoiding identifier clashes.  (It wouldn't
help for macros, but we have inline functions to
handle many cases.)

>
My hypothetical solution is to have a single function
returning a struct with pointers to all the public
functions of a module.

>
What stops that function name clashing with the single
function exported from other people's modules?

 A much lower probability.
 

I tried my C compiler with a couple of open source projects recently that both failed for the same mysterious reason.
It turned out that one of them used this line:
     #include "string.h"
and the other used:
     #include "malloc.h"
Notice they use "..." rather than <...>. These are not the standard headers, but user-written headers with the same names. (My compiler looks for them in the wrong order.)
People like reusing the same popular module names so much, they will even use the names of standard headers! Any exported function name is likely to be linked to the name of the module.
 >>> returning a struct with pointers to all the public
 >>> functions of a module.
There may be an additional clash-point with exposing the name of the struct.