On 2/2/23 04:24, Jason McKesson via Std-Proposals wrote:
>
> It's interesting that you bring up perfect forwarding. Because
> forwarding pretty much kills this idea (and most forms of named
> parameters.
>
> That is, if you want `T t(1, default, 5);` to work, how do you propose
> to make `optional<T> t(std::in_place, 1, default, 5);` work? Or better
> yet, `std::thread thr(some_functor(), 1, default, 5);`?

I do not propose to make that work. The proposal is just to be able to
write "default" for arguments that have a default, nothing more. This is
not intended to work across an abstraction layer such as std::thread,
std::bind, std::optional, function pointers, etc.

> The closest I could come up with is that the expression `default` is a
> prvalue of some `nullptr_t`-style type.

`default` would not be an expression in a full sense. It would be a core
language placeholder that is replaced by the default argument
expression. That is:

  template< typename T >
  void foo(T const& str = "Hello");

  foo(default); // literally equivalent to foo("Hello");,
                // which makes T be char[6].

Just to be clear, if `default` is used for an argument without a
default, the program is ill-formed (same as when you don't specify an
argument that doesn't have a default).

> Which opens up a whole new can of worms regarding overload resolution
> and function selection. Plus, there's the fact that "has a default
> parameter" is not an innate property of a function; it's just
> something that a particular declaration happens to have.

Per the above, overload resolution is unaffected, since the call is
functionally equivalent to the caller not specifying the argument at all.

> I would argue that if you cannot solve the forwarding problem for
> default parameters, then you're basically un-perfecting perfect
> forwarding (not that it's actually perfect as is, but it's not nearly
> this bad). And that's not worth the gains of being able to default
> parameters.

I'm not sure why you think that default argument values need to be
forwarded - this is not possible now, and it was not my intention to
support it with this proposal.