automatic int to short conversion - the HELL?

[Ary Borenszweig]

bearophile wrote:
> Ary Borenszweig:
>> No, no. In Java it's an error, an explicit cast is required.
>> http://www.programmersheaven.com/2/FAQ-JAVA-Type-Conversion-Casting
>> Which is perfect. It expresses the intents of the programmer:
> 
> About such matters I suggest you all to also take a look at how Ada works. Ada was designed first of all to create reliable software, so avoiding casting-derived bugs too is essential.
> D tries to avoid some of the pitfalls of C, to be a language less bug-prone: casts is where D has to improve still in such regards. Time ago (when I was more a D newbie) I have already had a bug in my code because of a casting bug:
> 
> import std.stdio;
> void main() {
>     int n = -5;
>     int[] a = [1, 2, 3];
>     writefln(a.length > n); // prints false
> }
> 
> A well designed language, even a system language like Ada or D, must avoid such kinds of bugs, regardless the amount of ignorance of the programmer.

Wow. At first, I thought that was already fixed. Now I've written that 
code, compiled it and run it and saw it gives false. Ok, I know a.length 
is an uint because logically it cannot be negative. But... shouldn't it 
be an int to avoid this kind of bugs?? You loose nothing doing this. You 
are never going to need an array of 2147483647 positions, much less a 
bigger array.

I've checked C#, which has uint as a type. The length of an array is an 
int, not an unit. A much better choice.

> Bye,
> bearophile