Dear community,

this is just a suggestion, but might be useful for the following R
releases. 

I was programming some C code for R and my compiler constantly showed me
some crazy messages that a stdc++ macro length() was supplied with 4
arguments whereas only one was required. The problem could be partially
resolved by changing the order of includes. However as soon as the file
was used from another units, the problem reappeared. Finally, it turned
out that length() with one argument was a macro in Rinternals.h along
with LENGTH. So I have to use namespace specifications on the rest of my
code, because R - length() is not protected under a namespace.

The problem is however that length is a pretty common name and as any
other very common name should be protected by a C namespace to avoid
confusion. Therefore, the suggestion/question - wouldn't it be
reasonable just to put the whole R includes into a unique namespace? It
wouldn't require any modifications in the existing libraries because if
the code is not conflicting, namespace can be omitted.

Does it have sense?

Regards
Oleg Sklyar
--
Dr Oleg Sklyar
European Bioinformatics Institute
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton, Cambridge
CB10 1SD
United Kingdom

tel +44 1223 492537
fax +44 1223 494468
email osklyar@ebi.ac.uk

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