BigInt bool assign

[Don]

On 24.12.2011 01:32, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 12/23/2011 11:34 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Friday, December 23, 2011 17:19:26 bearophile wrote:
>>> Derek Parnell:
>>>> I'm with Don on this one because a boolean and an integer are not the
>>>> same concept, and even though many programming languages implement
>>>> booleans using integers, it still doesn't make them the same thing.
>>>
>>> D doesn't implement booleans with integers, D has a boolean type. But D
>>> allows bools to implicitly cast to ints/longs.
>>
>> I'd actually argue that that's a mistake. Implicitly converting an int
>> to a
>> bool is one thing - that's useful in conditional expressions - but
>> converting
>> from bool to int is something else entirely. I see no reason to expand
>> that
>> problem into BigInt. _int_ shouldn't have it, let alone BigInt.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> A: "Um, so why does bool implicitly convert to int but not to BigInt?"
> B: "Because the language's design contains an error. It is a huge
> _problem_. Therefore we decided to keep it inconsistent. If you
> re-parenthesise your expression however, your code will compile."
> A: "Awesome!!"

As I said when I closed that post, it is _impossible_ for BigInt to 
always behave the same as int. One example:

byte c = x & 0x7F;

This compiles if x is an int. It doesn't compile if x is a BigInt.

BigInt's job is to behave like a Euclidean integer, not to be a drop-in 
replacement for built-in integer types.