[tsimionescu]

Note that the C and C++ standards have names for all of these operators. "->" is called the "member access" operator (though so is ".", to be fair). It also has the advantage of being a pretty clear typographic symbol - it can be called "arrow".

As for <iostream> overloading the left shift operator to use for writing to an ostream, that is widely regarded as a terrible idea, and such overloading is generally frowned upon in the community. In general, <iostream> was created before C++ was even standardized, and well before good practices became established, and doesn't reflect at all more common usage of the language (see also the fact that they don't throw exceptions by default).

The only other somewhat widely used example I know where operators are overloaded with entirely different meanings than their standard usage is indeed in the boost::spirit parser generator library, where they are trying to approximate the syntax of typical parser definitions using C++ operators, with at best mixed success. And they don't just overload <<, they overload all the operators with completely different meanings - such as overloading the unary plus (+x) operator to mean "token appears 1 or more times" and even the structure dereference operator (x) to mean "token appears 0 or more times" and so on. Still, I don't think too many people are crazy enough to mix boost::spirit with regular C++ in the same file.

Note also that operator overloading is not commonly supported in other C-family languages, typically because* they are trying to avoid C++'s usage of it.