I agree, "blatant absurdity" is quite a strong wording. I should've wrote "quite dubious" or the like. In my defense, I didn't even think of having a language

I agree, "blatant absurdity" is quite a strong wording. I should've wrote "quite dubious" or the like. In my defense, I didn't even think of having a language with type coercion and 0 operator overloading (even on builtin types). I never saw such a language, and I'm skeptical that it could work. But it's an interesting take on the problem. I cannot say why I think that the no-coercion+overloading is the better solution... maybe that's because operators are dyadic, and thus type coercion can be executed on both sides of the operator, and multiple times. While function application is (can be?) sort of monadic (in the APL sense) since coercion/overloading for an argument doesn't depend on the type of the other arguments supplied to the function (But while writing this, I'm not so sure anymore... at the very least, it could depend on the order in which arguments are evaluated...)