[OT] The Usual Arithmetic Confusions

[Paul Backus]

On Thursday, 17 February 2022 at 20:55:38 UTC, forkit wrote:
> On Thursday, 17 February 2022 at 20:11:07 UTC, Paul Backus 
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Yeah, implicit signed-to-unsigned conversion is really nasty. 
>> Even if we keep the rest of the C-style promotion rules, 
>> getting rid of that one would still be a big improvement.
>
> Implicit memory manipulation (e.g. type casting for example) 
> can result in unintentional memory safety bugs, which in turn 
> can result in adverse events. As such, it is not consistent 
> with the concept of memory safety.

Memory safety is about avoiding undefined behavior, not avoiding 
bugs in general. Implicitly casting an int to a uint can 
certainly cause bugs in a program, but it cannot introduce 
undefined behavior unless you are already doing something unsafe 
with the result (like indexing into an array without bounds 
checking).