I think we get into fuzzy territory when we use one term to refer to a complex feature, without having good terms for constituent parts of that feature. If java

I think we get into fuzzy territory when we use one term to refer to a complex feature, without having good terms for constituent parts of that feature. If java offered the ability to call methods in infix position, and give methods non-alphanumeric names, and maybe express something about precedence order, that would support a good share of uses for operator overloading without actually overloading anything. `x :+: y` would be easy enough to read as "an addition-like operation which is not the inbuilt addition" and would still closely resemble the math, and might be fine in a context where x and y are complex numbers or whatever. It would come at the obvious cost of requiring changes to a bunch of the supportive tooling surrounding the language. I think the messy part added by overloading specifically is that if `Complex`, `RealVector`, `List` etc all override addition, then there's some common class or interface which provides the declaration which they all override, and same for subtraction, multiplication, etc, and soon you have a large pile of interacting abstract definitions, which some language users will find daunting.