D design problem on platforms with <32 bit pointer width

[Dukc]

On Saturday, 19 August 2023 at 10:43:59 UTC, Dom DiSc wrote:
> I hate those stupid promotion rules.
> Every literal should be of the smallest type that can represent 
> it
> (e.g. 0..255 should be ubyte, 256..65535 should be ushort, 
> etc., -1..-127 should be byte, -128..-32767 should be short, 
> ...) and can be promoted to whatever is needed implicitly.

It's not quite that simple. Consider:

```d
auto x = 40;
// 1600 now, 64 with your rules
x *= x;
```

Inference happens at initialisation of the variable. In this 
case, it's `ubyte` because nothing bigger is needed to hold the 
initialisation value. Inference can't detect what is needed 
later, that is why int literals default to 32 bits.