But you lose the constant syntax that allows STL containers to work. vector<int> and vector<Person> work because vector can be templated, and

    int i1;
    int i2 = i1;

    Person p1;
    Person p2 = p1;

both have the same syntax. If suddenly p2 = p1 no longer compiles and you have to do p2 = &p1 that looks really weird because the two sides of the = have different types and vector<Person> no longer will compile. On the other hand if we say all overloaded operators automatically convert operands to their addresses, then we are sort of back where we started with references: you can modify a variable inside a function without having to say &. Only this would be much less flexible than what we have now because sometimes you want an overloaded operator to take something by value, but wouldn't be able to do it.