unsigned policy (implicit conversions for complex?)

[Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email)]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Derek Parnell wrote:
>> On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 16:03:14 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For
>> Email) wrote:
>>
>>> http://erdani.org/d-implicit-conversions.pdf
>>  
>>> Did I forget something?
>>
>> Characters are not numbers. 
> 
> That's an enticing point of view, and it sounds good. But Pascal has 
> that view, and my experience with it is it's one of the reasons Pascal 
> sucks.
> 
> Examples:
> 
> 1) converting text <=> integers
> 2) converting case
> 3) doing compression/encryption code
> 4) using characters as indices (isspace() for example)
> 
> Take away the implicit conversions, and such code gets littered with 
> ugly casts.

Ionno. Probably instead of dealing with data as a stream/string of 
characters, you handle it as integers, and that's just one cast. Pascal 
didn't offer you that.

How about the infamous automatic bool -> int conversion? Now that's a 
sucker that caused a ton of harm to C++.


Andrei