Non-ugly ways to implement a 'static' class or namespace?

[thebluepandabear]

On Monday, 23 January 2023 at 00:27:29 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> On Monday, 23 January 2023 at 00:21:12 UTC, thebluepandabear 
> wrote:
>> there's nothing in the language currently that would 'force' 
>> the user
>
> Why do you hate freedom?

It's not a freedom issue, it's a library-design issue. Some 
libraries want to incorporate a namespace-like design to force 
the user to be more 'explicit' with what they want.

SFML has a `Keyboard` namespace which has a `Key` enum.

The user is 'forced' (although I am not sure if this is the case 
since it's C++) to use the `Keyboard.` declaration before using 
the `Key` enum. Looking at code block 1 and 2, which makes more 
sense?

```C++
Keyboard::Key.A
```

```C++
Key.A
```

The first one does, because looking at the second one, the person 
who will read the code might be confused what 'Key' means, is it 
a car key, a set of keys for unlocking something, etc?

Now, the user doesn't have to use the library if they don't want 
to. There will be plenty of libraries out there that don't have 
namespaces.

I haven't been programming for a long time, but most of the other 
languages I used had such a namespace feature. Kotlin has 
something called an `object` which is essentially a namespace and 
it is great. The benefits of adding a namespace-like feature 
outweigh its costs, imo.