Notes from 10/00 meeting:
A major concern over the idea of partial specialization of function templates is that function templates can be overloaded, unlike class templates. Simply naming the function template in the specialization, as is done for class specialization, is not adequate to identify the template being specialized.
In view of this problem, the library working group is exploring the other alternative, permitting overloads to be added to functions in namespace std, as long as certain restrictions (to be determined) are satisfied.
(See also documents N1295 and N1296 and issue 285.)