On Friday, January 2nd, 2026 at 11:49 AM, Jan Schultke via Std-Proposals <std-proposals@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

What about a mixture of positional and named parameters?

Things can get pretty confusing when mixing of positional and named arguments is permitted. The low-hanging fruit is to allow positional arguments at the start of the argument list, which has the obvious behavior of working exactly like positional arguments normally do.

More recent versions of Kotlin allow you to mix positional and named arguments in the middle, but only within a prefix of arguments where if an argument is named, it needs to be in the same position as if it was provided positionally. For example, f(.first=0, 1) is valid, but f(.second=1, 0) is not. However, what Kotlin eventually made valid is unnecessarily ambitious for the first version of such a feature.

I wonder if the mixed-use use case is a real thing, though? It's clearly a question to be addressed, but I imagine that people who want named parameters will always use them, and those who don't will never use them (unless/until forced).

That said, variadic functions will present an interesting problem or two.