And cleaner still is to not obfuscate things to this degree, no matter what syntax is involved. It certainly violates the “write once, read many times” princip

And cleaner still is to not obfuscate things to this degree, no matter what syntax is involved. It certainly violates the “write once, read many times” principle: no matter how many times I look at something like this, I have to study the whole thing just to figure out what is even happening! Whereas, seeing "void g(x) { f(2, 5, x); }" is perfectly clear. It certainly violates the “premature optimization” principle: in exchange for some unproven benefit, the compiler does gymnastics to bind arguments and adds compile time instead of just paying a little more in space and runtime to define a 2nd function that calls a 1st function in a completely obvious way. It also qualifies as over-design. Even if a single binding is considered OK (and that’s a big “if”), there is every reason to expect that during normal maintenance someone will need to keep adding more. Then you have several lines of template-ese. A simple function is something that anyone can extend, whereas it’s not clear most engineers will even know how to maintain the binding version.