typedefs are useless

[Steven Schveighoffer]

This may have arisen somewhere before, but...

Let's say I want a way to create a type that's like a long, but is not 
implicitly convertable from a long.

I can do:

typedef long mytype;

However, I can't create literals of this type.  so if I want to initialize a 
mytype value to 6, I have to do:

mytype x = cast(mytype)6L;

And if I want to scale a mytype value, I can do:

x *= 6;

but if I wanted to create a scaled value of another mytype value, this is 
illegal:

x = y * 6;

So in order to get this to work, I have to do:

x = y * cast(mytype)6;

which is really cumersome, when what I want is a integral type that is 
semantically different from the integral type it's based on.  But I want 
literals of the base type to implicitly convert to my type so I don't have 
these ugly casts.

Note that an enum is EXACTLY the same as a typedef, with the added feature 
that an enum can have const values of itself accessible as members.  In that 
regard, why would anyone use a typedef when it is a less-functional version 
of an enum?

in short, I would like the compiler to auto promote a literal to a typedef 
that was based on that literal's type.  Not sure if this is feasible, but 
without something like this, there is no reason to have a typedef keyword. 
I can use enum instead.

-Steve