Question

I have a widely used c++ library which holds a method such as:

foo();

I want to overload this function to have a default argument such as:

foo(bool verbose=false);

does this change force me to recompile every code that uses this function?
can’t a call to foo() without the argument keep working as the no-args-signature didn’t change?

by the way – I’m using gcc

thanks

Answer 1

does this change force me to recompile every code that uses this function?

Yes, and the compile will fail, since there will be an ambiguity.

What you can do is overload the function like so:

foo(bool verbose);

and treat the case foo() as if the parameter was false.

This wouldn’t require a re-compilation. You’d just have two functions:

foo() { foo(false); } //possibly
foo(bool verbose);

instead of one with a default paramter.