Beautiful C++: 30 Core Guidelines for Writing Clean, Safe, and Fast Code

Chapter 1.2

F.51: Where there is a choice, prefer default arguments over overloading

Introduction

API design is a valuable skill. As you decompose a problem into its constituent abstractions, you need to identify the abstractions and design an interface for them, giving the client clear and unambiguous usage instructions in the form of a com-pletely obvious set of carefully named functions. There is a saying that code should be self-documenting. While this is a lofty ambition, it is in API design that you should try hardest to meet this goal.

Codebases grow. They just do. There is no getting away from it. Time passes, more abstractions are discovered and encoded, more problems are solved, and the problem domain itself expands to accommodate ...