Overload a method or use default values? c++

Question

I\'m still relatively new to C++ and I can\'t seem to figure out the difference in the following two ways of coding a function that may take one parameter or maybe two or th

Answer 1

You are making use of the overloading feature, if you provide several constructors. The advantage in this case is, that you can react differently in every constructor on the passed arguments. If that is of importance use overloading.
If you can provide decent default values for your parameters and these wouldn't affect the proper running of your code, use default parameters.

See here for a thread on SO.