Interestingly, the C++ committee once considered adding named parameter passing to the language, and decided a halfway intelligent implementation could simply transform the argument list into a “pass by position” system during parsing. That is, the actual function call system would stay the same, but the parser would simply be smarter and translate from the pass by name into pass by position.

However, because C++ allows you to name parameters differently in the header and the implementation (precisely because of the way parameters are usually passed by position), the committee couldn’t decide *which* names to use (the ones in the header, or the ones in the implementation, or both, …).

Anyhow, turns out this is one of those nice features you need to add early if you hope to avoid meeting the devil in the details.