Can't add ubytes together to make a ubyte... bug or feature?

[Soviet Friend via Digitalmars-d-learn]

I just attempted to add one ubyte to another and store the result 
in a ubyte but apparently ubytes get converted to ints when being 
added... and converting what becomes an int becomes impossible to 
store in a ubyte without an explicit cast...

ubyte a, b;
ubyte c = a + b; // Error: cannot implicitly convert expression 
(cast(int)a + cast(int)b) of type int to ubyte

On principal I'm not casting to fix this. I don't care if my 
computer needs to do math on a 4 byte basis, I'm not writing 
assembly. I'm really hoping this is a bug because trying to use 
any type other than ints is going to make for some really ugly 
code otherwise...

Can I prevent the initial implicit casts?


On the topic of complaining about casting... array lengths as 
ulongs is painful... any chance of an array[].lengthi being a 
thing?