Could operator overloading have worked without references?

Question

According to Bjarne Stroustrup, references were introduced into C++ to support operator overloading:

References were introduced primarily to support o

Answer 1

C++ aims at being strongly typed, so trying to be consistent with that philosophy, it makes sense that an object is-not-a pointer to that object, and I totally agree with sbi about how great it is not to have automatic conversion happening all around (I have in mind multi-contributors projects).

To address your concern more specifically, people learning C++ can get confused at first by references vs. pointer, but I am not sure it would clarify anything for them to have this kind of automatic conversion happening on their behalf.
For example :

Foo ** operator+(Foo **lhs, Foo **rhs)
{...}

Foo *varFoo1,*varFoo2;
varFoo1 + &varFoo2;

Following the hypothetical implicit object-to-pointer, should varFoo1 be accepted as an argument to a method expecting Foo ** ? Because the method expects a pointer to Foo * and varFoo1 *is-a* Foo *.

An other advantage of reference used as arguments :
const references can receive a rvalue as argument (ex. the classic string literal), while pointers can't.