Editing Identifier (section)

===Implicit context and namespace conflicts===
{{see also|Naming collision}}
Many [[code]]s and [[nomenclature|nomenclatural]] systems originate within a small [[namespace]]. Over the years, some of them bleed into larger namespaces (as people interact in ways they formerly had not, e.g., cross-border trade, scientific collaboration, military alliance, and general cultural interconnection or assimilation). When such dissemination happens, the limitations of the original naming convention, which had formerly been latent and moot, become painfully apparent, often necessitating [[retronym]]y, [[synonym]]ity,
translation/[[transcoding]], and so on. Such limitations generally accompany the shift away from the original context to the broader one. Typically the system shows implicit context (context was formerly assumed, and narrow), lack of capacity (e.g., low number  of possible IDs, reflecting the outmoded narrow context), lack of [[extensibility]] (no features defined and reserved against future needs), and lack of specificity and disambiguating capability (related to the context shift, where longstanding uniqueness encounters novel nonuniqueness). Within computer science, this problem is called [[naming collision]]. The story of the origination and expansion of the [[CODEN]] system provides a good case example in a recent-decades, technical-nomenclature context. The capitalization variations seen with [[proper noun#Specific designators|specific designators]] reveals an instance of this problem occurring in [[natural language]]s, where the proper&nbsp;noun/common&nbsp;noun distinction (and its complications) must be dealt with. A universe in which every object had a UID would not need any namespaces, which is to say that it would constitute one gigantic namespace; but human minds could never keep track of, or semantically interrelate, so many UIDs.