OT (partially): about promotion of integers

[foobar]

On Wednesday, 12 December 2012 at 00:06:53 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> foobar:
>
>>I would enforce overflow and underflow checking semantics.<
>
> Plus one or two switches to disable such checking, if/when 
> someone wants it, to regain the C performance. (Plus some 
> syntax way to disable/enable such checking in a small piece of 
> code).
>
> Maybe someday Walter will change his mind about this topic :-)
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

Yeah, of course, that's why I said the C# semantics are _way_ 
better. (That's a self quote)

btw, here's the link for SML which does not use tagged ints -
http://www.standardml.org/Basis/word.html#Word8:STR:SPEC

"Instances of the signature WORD provide a type of unsigned 
integer with modular arithmetic and logical operations and 
conversion operations. They are also meant to give efficient 
access to the primitive machine word types of the underlying 
hardware, and support bit-level operations on integers. They are 
not meant to be a ``larger'' int. "