Implicit enum conversions are a stupid PITA

[Walter Bright]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 03/26/2010 06:26 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> KennyTM~ wrote:
>>> On Mar 26, 10 11:32, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>> Supporting it means it will "silently and disastrously break code"
>>>>> from anyone who tries to use a leading zero and *isn't* a C guru,
>>>>
>>>> You don't need to be a guru to know that. I was once a C newbie, and
>>>> never had any trouble with it.
>>>>
>>>> It isn't just C, either, the same syntax is used in C++, Objective-C,
>>>> Groovy, M4, Clojure, Go, Java, Scala, Javascript, PHP, Ruby, bash,
>>>> Python (2.6 and earlier) and Perl.
>>>>
>>>> (It is not used in C#, Python 3.0, Fortran, or VisualBasic.)
>>>
>>> And removed in ECMAScript 5 (next standard of Javascript).
>>
>> I didn't know that. But still, it's hard to be a programmer and not use
>> a language that has such literals.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

I was responding to Nick's argument:

------------------------------
Supporting it means it will "silently and disastrously break code" from anyone 
who tries to use a leading zero and *isn't* a C guru, and very few people these 
days are (I used C for years without being aware of that octal syntax - it's 
only by dumb luck I didn't try to use a leading zero).
-------------------------------

where the statement of very few people being exposed to such literals is the 
issue. I should have left in the fuller quote.