Is there any reason why arithmetic operation on shorts and bytes return int?

[bearophile]

d coder:

> Tell me, if what I am doing is dangerous, how come doing the 
> following is not dangerous. It is allowed by D.
>
> int a, b, c;
> a = b + c;

I think this dis-uniformity was added because:
- Statistically it's more common to have an overflow when you sum 
two bytes compared to summing two ints.
- If the sum of two ints/uints requires a cast, you need to fill 
your code with casts. And casts are not safe at all, they are 
sharp powertools.

(I have asked many times for runtime integral overflows in D (as 
in C#/Delphi), that can be disabled with a compilation switch. 
But D designers come from the great unsafety of C-like languages 
and do not agree with me on the dangers/bugs of fixnum 
operations).

Bye,
bearophile