sure, no question - but that's out of the standards body control. And even if you don't include your own top-level dir, using a common file name might clash in

sure, no question - but that's out of the standards body control. And even if you don't include your own top-level dir, using a common file name might clash in other dirs too. Hoping that compilers would not resolve headers via user-specifiable directories sounds absurd to me - every single compiler I know of allows that, not just on unix, so if you want to retire that, that's going to be huge, multi-year effort. No point in considering that hypothetical reality when it comes to meaningful header names unless there is a reasonable likelihood of that happening. Not objecting to such a push; it just sounds wildly out of scope when picking a header file name.