True that integer promotion rules are defined in terms of the machine dependent unsized "real" integer types. That is indeed annoying. I guess I've found ways to cope. Good thing is, those promotions never cast down, they only widen types.

The point of namespaces is exactly to allow less qualified names, to allow spending less energy when creating new names, by having the compiler always add a qualification implicitly. However, that doesn't solve the problem with name collisions when reading or grepping the source code -- it actually makes it much worse. And avoiding those name collisions, i.e. what's in the source literally, what the programmer reads, and what less-than-perfect tools see, is at least as important as avoiding "semantic" name collisions and being able to compile the code.

Namespaces not only encourage many more literal collisions -- now a single name can be available in various shortenings, and even under different aliases, which also makes it hard to tell that two symbols refer to the same thing!

I've found that the only way to get names right is to find a good scheme, to find meaningful good prefixes, suffixes, and abbreviations, and to come up with a system to create new names more mechanically but still keep them as short and readable as possible.