On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 1:53 PM Jonathan Wakely via Std-Proposals <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Jan 2026 at 18:49, Jonathan Wakely <cxx_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>>
>> But it seems like a badly-designed overload set anyway, since you have
>> one function name "interest" but the functions do two different things. It
>> would probably be better if you had names that make what they do clearer,
>> calc_interest_factor and calc_interest_major_minor or something (I have no
>> idea what the "minor" argument means, so better names are probably
>> possible).
>>
>
> https://abseil.io/tips/148 is highly relevant here (and to the bugs
> described by David Crocker elsewhere in the thread):
>
> “Use overloaded functions (including constructors) only if a reader
> looking at a call site can get a good idea of what is happening without
> having to first figure out exactly which overload is being called.”
>
> If you have overloads with the same number of parameters, they had damn
> well better be (mostly) interchangeable, e.g. it doesn't really matter if
> you call std::pow(5.0, 2L) instead of std::pow(5.0, 2.0) because they do
> the same thing. If they perform different operations based on the type of
> the second argument, that's a bad API.
>

Yep. As Titus Winters said many years ago now, "The atom of C++ API design
is the overload set [not the individual function]."
I also have a talk on this from the pandemic years: "When should you give
two things the same name?" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQgFEkgKx2s>
(C++Now 2021), which was based on my October 2020 blog post "Inheritance is
for sharing an interface (and so is overloading)."
<https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/10/09/when-to-derive-and-overload/>
See also my next post, "A very short war story on too much overloading,"
<https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/10/11/overloading-considered-harmful/>
which
relates specifically to conversions-to-bool.

I recently revisited implicit-conversion-to-bool in "What breaks without
implicit T*-to-bool conversion?"
<https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2025/10/05/pointer-to-bool-conversion/> —
the answer is, a few things but not much.

–Arthur