The Art of Assembly Language, 2nd Edition

5.25 Namespace Pollution

One problem with creating libraries with a lot of different modules is namespace pollution. A typical library module will have a #include file associated with it that provides external definitions for all the routines, constants, variables, and other symbols provided in the library. Whenever you want to use some routines or other objects from the library, you would typically #include the library's header file in your project. As your libraries get larger and you add declarations in the header file, it becomes likely that the names you've chosen for your library's identifiers will conflict with names you want to use in your current project. This is known as namespace pollution: library header files pollute the namespace ...