Should negating an unsigned integral be an error?

[bauss]

On Tuesday, 30 January 2018 at 11:09:08 UTC, Michael wrote:
> On Monday, 29 January 2018 at 10:06:41 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
> wrote:
>> On Monday, January 29, 2018 09:58:00 Dave Jones via 
>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> Given
>>>
>>> uint i = 12345;
>>>
>>> should
>>>
>>> writeln(-i)
>>>
>>> be an error? or maybe i should be automatically cast to a 
>>> larger signed type?
>>
>> It arguably should be, but it's pretty common in C/C++ to get 
>> uint.max with -1, and I suspect that it's fairly common in D 
>> as well even though you could just use uint.max. So, it could 
>> be argued either way.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> I'd like to see these kinds of potential mistakes to be forced 
> to use something like uint.max. Of course, at this point it 
> might be too late to introduce something as breaking as this, 
> but these kinds of things should definitely be forced by the 
> language, or made a warning at least, pointing to the use of 
> .max instead.

A normal deprecation process should be enough, since it'll give 
time to update code that uses it.

I don't think there is a lot of idiomatic D code that uses this 
feature.