Is there any reason why arithmetic operation on shorts and bytes return int?

[Denis Koroskin]

On Wednesday, 12 December 2012 at 03:10:15 UTC, d coder wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 3:40 AM, Walter Bright
> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>wrote:
>
>> No worries there :-) I feel pretty dang strongly about this 
>> issue, from
>> bad experience.
>>
>> Even if a language behaves "wrong", it is still usable if it is
>> predictable.
>>
>
> Agreed.
>
> How about this.
>
> 1. Let "char" and "short" behave the C/C++ way. These can 
> return integers.
> This will make C/C++ code work in D.
> 2. Make D "byte" operations return bytes. And create another 
> type (named
> say dbyte or shortint) and make operations on the new type 
> return
> shortints. This will make these types more usable in D code. 
> Well we end up
> adding another keyword, but we shall get workable and safe 
> 8-bit and 16-bit
> integrals.
>
> Regards
> - Puneet

What's now is safer than what you propose. You can always create 
your own data type that would automatically truncate result if 
you wish so.