>   People say "it would reduce readability/maintainability", "many experts
 > advocate the usage of 'using' statements". Could some rational arguments
 > explaining these claims be given?

Interestingly enough, for the couple of years I hung around on the Ada 
newsgroups, this was one of the ongoing repeated flamefest topics. Some 
people thought it was always dangerous to use the Ada equivalent of 
importing a namespace, some people thought it was reasonable for namespaces 
equivalent to the sorts of things you find in std:: (like variable-length 
string managment, etc).  Most people agreed it was OK if you limited the 
scope of the import to (for example) one routine at a time. Of course, in 
Ada you can nest procedures inside other procedures, so that was less of a 
hardship than it would be in C++.

FWIW, I don't remember anyone on the Ada groups ever providing actual 
scientific evidence one way or the other either. And I'd think if there's 
any programming language where that sort of evidence would be around, it 
would likely be Ada.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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