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I thought functional languages had to give up on most forms of overloading as well as implicit conversions for their algorithms to work.

While the former is not a big deal, the latter would be a deal breaker (as much as I have learned to live without).

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You are right. But these problems can be solved using annotations.

Your comment helped me to narrow my complaint: While functional languages require annotations for things that are not obvious (when to subclass, when to change the type of an object, what overload should I use) and infer the obvious ("n*fact(n-1)" is an integer); C++ infers the non-obvious and requires you to add annotations on the obvious!

Phrased that way, it is striking.

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