name mangling

Name mangling is also necessary in Fortran compilers, originally because the language is case insensitive.

Visual C++ name mangling is a mangling (decoration) scheme used in Microsoft Visual C++ series of compilers.

Probably the best-known example of name mangling occurs on VFAT file systems on versions of Windows from Windows 95 onwards.

However, the strongest argument for name mangling is prevention of unpredictable breakage of programs: introducing a new public variable in a superclass can break subclasses if they don't use "private" variables.

As for the warning when changing file name extensions, it's a reasonable thing to do in a system where (unfortunately) file name mangling is the official way to encode file type metadata.

Although name mangling is not generally required or used by languages that do not support function overloading (such as C and classic Pascal), they use it in some cases to provide additional information about a function.

Such name mangling occurs, for example, on computer networks when a Microsoft Windows machine attempts to access a file on a Unix server and that file has a filename which includes characters not valid in Windows.