function parameters: is it possible to pass byref ... while being optional at the same time ?

[someone]

On Sunday, 18 July 2021 at 01:49:11 UTC, Brian Tiffin wrote:

> It's our best hope. Self taught programming is scary.  School 
> taught programming is scary.  Corporate taught programming is 
> scary.  *Practice makes perfect?  No, practice makes permanent.*
>
> The sanest path forward for the profession is Peer taught 
> programming, in public.

I am a self-taught programmer well before college, furthermore, I 
am *almost* a self-taught guy in everything that interests me 
(albeit the fact that I have a degree in electronics 
engineering), but I am *not*, in *any way*, ashamed to ask 
anything no matter the issue, I have no pride when I am asking 
questions, I am not ashamed to answer no when I don't have the 
answer, I want to learn, and to teach whenever I feel I have and 
edge on something.

That being said, one of the things that I felt in love with when 
I was first exposed to was OOP; with all its pros and cons. OOP 
made me a far better programmer than I was before. And it was not 
in college nor anywhere near to, it was on one of my first jobs 
as a developer at a financial institution which by the time back 
in the early 90s was using a database manager called FoxPro wich 
evolved to Visual FoxPro by the time Microsoft bought it and it 
was fully OOP from top to bottom and was far ahead of similar 
tools of the era, so far ahead in the language and flexibility 
and speed that a few years after it was released Microsoft killed 
it because a lot of companies were doing serious business with it 
while *not buying* Microsoft's star-database, SQL Server, which 
obviously was far far  expensive.

It was with this tool that I learned primarily to encapsulate 
everything -and it payed off; code quality using OOP was far 
superior. These were my humble origins to OOP far away from 
things like LISP and what-not that I didn't know they even 
existed. C++ came afterward with all its complexity and 50% of 
the guys loving it and the other 50% hating it with passion. I 
don't know of any other language so divisive than C++. And no, I 
don't love it nor hate it, I respect it, it is powerful, the 
problem with C++ is that anyone writing code with it feels the 
need to show you how big has his ... and you came across 
constructions that seem complex puzzles; so, in practice, unless 
you have some guidelines cast in stone at company level, you end 
fighting the language, or more precisely, the ones coding with 
the language.