Why there is too many uneccessary casts?

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Wednesday, 12 June 2013 at 01:35:47 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> 	// byte multiplication, answer goes into a 16 bit register, 
> but we could truncate it too


BTW just as a personal note you might be amused by, this multiply 
instruction beat the crap out of me when I was learning x86 
assembly back in the day. Figuring out what was multiplied by 
what and where the answer went took me an embarrassingly long 
time, so I avoided mul and div for quite a while when coding. I'd 
say mul is slow anyway so that's why I was avoiding it, but the 
truth was I just didn't know how it worked! The instruction sheet 
saying the product is stored in DX:AX didn't help much, I 
remember thinking it meant a memory address and getting all kinds 
of nonsense trying to read from it....

So I'm talking now partially because I'm a bit proud to know all 
this stuff after my early failures all that time ago.