Yes I know that, but the point is that the "operator overloading is terrible" complaint typically cites either plainly daft straw men like "what if someone overrides + to mean subtraction", or else hones in on << for streams, which as others have pointed out here is actually perfectly readable and sensible. I have yet to see a single sensible criticism that holds water (OK, MS overloading address-of & on a smart pointer, that one was stupid ..)
Conversely, there was an XML library for Scala posted on Reddit about a year ago that used things like <:<, <<? and <> as method names; clearly the freedom to concoct your own symbolic names is far more open to abuse than the oft-maligned C++ mechanism.
Two big problems with overloading << for streams are operator precedence (the precedence of << makes little sense for a stream operator) and the fact that the chained syntax can make the whole thing ambiguous (which is kind of a subset of the precedence problem), e.g.: cout << x << 3, does that shift x by 3, or output x and 3 separately?
Conversely, there was an XML library for Scala posted on Reddit about a year ago that used things like <:<, <<? and <> as method names; clearly the freedom to concoct your own symbolic names is far more open to abuse than the oft-maligned C++ mechanism.