Why do shift operators undergo integral promotion?

[Walter Bright]

On 8/9/2011 3:04 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Hmmm. It seems to me that the question is whether anyone would ever
> _intentially_ use this behavior. Is there any benefit to it whatsoever? If
> not, I'd argue that the risk of breakage to C code being ported over is
> minimal and that the behavior should be fixed in D. Now, if there _is_ a
> benefit to it such that someone would use it intentionally, then that's
> another story, but it sure likes like the only reason that it would occur in C
> code would be because the programmer who wrote it screwed up.
>
> Now, that's still going to change the behavior of any code which used this
> behavior - even if it was by accident - which risks making code fail to work
> even if it only worked through a miracle before (i.e. in spite of the bug).
> So, maybe that's enough that we can't fix it. But it sure seems like the risk
> of new breakage is very low, since code whose behavior would change was broken
> in the first place, and I'd hate to see D's behavior stay like this if we can
> fix it.

I don't see why it's a miracle that s>>1 would yield an int result.

Do any of the C lints flag this as a bad practice?