Operator overloading has been a feature of many languages dating back to the very concept of using operator notation in programming. I know of no language that has the * operator dedicated solely to a single type. Typically you have at least signed and unsigned overload, as well as various bit sizes (including larger than the machine word size), and floating point representations. Extending that to vectorial operations, arbitrary precision, and others only seem to make sense and to be going with the flow...