Earlier quoted context omitted.
"int" doesn't imply anything about the base.
It does for human beings. We use base-10 for basically everything. This is true even for most programmers in most situations. Human beings aren't computers, and we aren't abstract math processing units who by default consider numbers abstracted (e.g. as elements of Rings). This goes double for string representations of numbers--in the majority of cases a number represented by a string is a number meant for human cons…
It does.
> and entirely unreasonable to expect to be required to provide a base as anything except an optional argument
It is optional.
> and certainly it is unreasonable to expect that that second optional argument is treated as not optional in a composition operation
I don't understand what you're saying here. It's never treated as required, it's just map supplies a parameter in that position, so it get's used. That's how optional parameters work.
The wat (if there is one) is that map provides extra arguments.