[amouat]

Yes, but I think it is far worse in the case of built-ins; it is explicitly obvious that "add" is not part of the language, which is not the case with "+". Admittedly this is much more of a problem for new programmers than experts.

To be fair, I think a lot my prejudice against overriding operators is summed up by Bruce Eckel (who explains why it is arguably misguided in the case of Java):

"[Java designers] thought operator overloading was too hard for programmers to use properly. Which is basically true in C++, because C++ has both stack allocation and heap allocation and you must overload your operators to handle all situations and not cause memory leaks. Difficult indeed. Java, however, has a single storage allocation mechanism and a garbage collector, which makes operator overloading trivial -- as was shown in C# (but had already been shown in Python, which predated Java). But for many years, the partly line from the Java team was "Operator overloading is too complicated."

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=252441