I did not say implicits and default arguments are the same thing. I said that implicits improve upon default arguments in various ways, the key realisation bein

I did not say implicits and default arguments are the same thing. I said that implicits improve upon default arguments in various ways, the key realisation being the split between providing elided values in a context-dependent way, and permitting the elision of values. I should not have said the key idea, but a key idea. Default arguments are convenient if you don't need context dependence of elided arguments. I'd probably have remove defaults in order to have a smaller and more simple language.