Question

I tried to do something like this:

int& g(int& number = 0)
{
//maybe do something with number
    return number;
}

but it doesn’t work. It has to be passed by reference.
Thank you for any help.

P.S.
I think that “Related Questions” appearing once you type Title is a good idea, but I also think that they should be displayed only if they are related to specific language, i.e. it is less than useless for me to looking at topic with similar problem but in Ruby.

Answer 1

If you really want to do this:

• make the reference const, so that a temporary can be bound to it
• put the default in the function declaration, not the definition

For example:

// header
const int & g( const int & number = 0 );


// implementation
const int & g( const int & number )
{
//maybe do something with number
    return number;
}

PS Post your complaints about how SO works on Meta, not here (for all the good it will do – answering this question indicated they STILL haven’t fixed the code-after-list bug)