Editing Name mangling (section)

====Complex example====
The mangled symbols in this example, in the comments below the respective identifier name, are those produced by the GNU GCC 3.x compilers, according to the [[IA-64]] (Itanium) ABI:

<syntaxhighlight lang="cpp">
namespace wikipedia 
{
   class article 
   {
   public:
      std::string format ();  // = _ZN9wikipedia7article6formatEv

      bool print_to (std::ostream&);  // = _ZN9wikipedia7article8print_toERSo

      class wikilink 
      {
      public:
         wikilink (std::string const& name);  // = _ZN9wikipedia7article8wikilinkC1ERKSs
      };
   };
}
</syntaxhighlight>

All mangled symbols begin with {{code|_Z}} (note that an identifier beginning with an underscore followed by a capital letter is a [[reserved identifier]] in C, so conflict with user identifiers is avoided); for nested names (including both namespaces and classes), this is followed by {{code|N}}, then a series of &lt;length, id&gt; pairs (the length being the length of the next identifier), and finally {{code|E}}. For example, {{code|wikipedia::article::format}} becomes:

 _ZN9wikipedia7article6formatE

For functions, this is then followed by the type information; as {{code|format()}} is a {{code|void}} function, this is simply {{code|v}}; hence:

 _ZN9wikipedia7article6formatEv

For {{code|print_to}}, the standard type {{code|std::ostream}} (which is a {{mono|[[typedef]]}} for {{code|std::basic_ostream<char, std::char_traits<char> >}}) is used, which has the special alias {{code|So}}; a reference to this type is therefore {{code|RSo}}, with the complete name for the function being:

 _ZN9wikipedia7article8print_toERSo