namespaces and syntactic sugar

[marlowa]

I like what I have seen of POCO so far so I am reluctant to kick things off with a negative post, but... why does POCO use syntactic sugar for namespace scoping? E.g instead of:

namespace Fred {
blah blah
}

we have:

Fred_BEGIN
blah blah
Fred_END

I don't see what practical benefit comes from this style. Can someone enlighten me please?

-Andrew Marlow

[guenter]

The original idea behind it was to make it easier one day to change namespaces (e.g., put a top-level POCO namespace around everything), without having to change too much source code.

Another side effect is that it saves (at least) one level of indentation.