title: Using fully qualified names in C++
body: <p>I am a C++ newcomer, trying to learn the language in parallel as I work on a project that requires it. I am using a fairly popular and stable open source library to do a lot of heavy lifting. Reading through the source, tutorials and code samples for the library, I have noticed that they always use fully qualified names when declaring types, which often results in <em>very</em> long and verbose lines with lots of ::'s. Is this considered best practice in C++? Is there a different way to deal with this?</p>