[awson]

"wouldn't necessarily be able"

It goes completely against the most (perhaps) fundamental part of C++ philosophy of overloading functions on argument types.

[tuukkah]

Overloading does not conflict with type inference: it just means that type annotations are sometimes necessary to get down to concrete types for execution. From "f(x)" we can infer that the type of x is one of f's overloaded argument types.