[gmueckl]

No, the language of the standard carefully omits talking about files. This is because there are still ancient mainframe operating systems around that do not have typical hierarchical filesystems, but it is still technically possible to provide a C++ implementation for these. Prescribing a module name to file name mapping woukd not work in these environments either. This is also why #pragma once was rejected and the replacement #once [unique ID] was invented instead: just defining what is and isn't the same file for #pragma once turned out too difficult to define.

[ahaferburg]

What I don't get though is why these ancient mainframes need the latest version of the standard. I can't imagine the compiler writers for these OSs to be too eager implement any change at all. You said "technically possible", are you implying that nobody actually does? What are these OSs?

To me this seems like a weird take on accessibility. In order to accommodate that one OS that has some serious disabilities, everyone else has to suffer the consequences. Why not build a ramp for that one OS, and build stairs for everyone else?

[gpderetta]

IBM has multiple people in the standard committee and they care a lot for both backward compatibility and new standards. They alone were strongly opposed from removing trigraphs from the standard.

Still trigraphs were removed in the end; if there is enough support the committee is willing to break backward compatibility.

[simias]

>just defining what is and isn't the same file for #pragma once turned out too difficult to define.

Admittedly that's not just a problem with old mainframes. Any system supporting file aliases (be it hardlinks, symlinks or the same FS mounted at several locations for instance) would be tricky to handle.

I always thought #pragma once was a bad idea for that reason, header guards with unique IDs don't require any compiler magic and are simple to reason about without having to read the standard or compiler's docs to figure out how it operates.