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

[Walter Bright]

On 12/11/2012 5:24 AM, d coder wrote:
> Would I be asking for too much if I ask DMD to provide a compiler
> flag that makes it return bytes and shorts for operations on them? So the deal
> would be, if you use this compiler flag, code behavior would be different from
> that of C/C++.

Having compiler flags that fundamentally change the behavior of the language are 
a disaster from about every point of view.