[OT] The Usual Arithmetic Confusions

[forkit]

On Thursday, 17 February 2022 at 20:11:07 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>
>
> Yeah, implicit signed-to-unsigned conversion is really nasty. 
> Even if we keep the rest of the C-style promotion rules, 
> getting rid of that one would still be a big improvement.

Implicit memory manipulation (e.g. type casting for example) can 
result in unintentional memory safety bugs, which in turn can 
result in adverse events. As such, it is not consistent with the 
concept of memory safety.

It would be great if D had a feature whereby I could annotate a 
function in such a way, that it disallowed implicit type 
conversions on its input arguments.

Regardless, I think this is another reason why D is unlikely to 
ever get widespread adoption. That is, the ship has sailed with 
regards to the pricipals of memory safety in programming 
languages, and the decisions Rust has made with regards to 
inherent safety, have resulted in the kind of language features 
programmers *will have to* work with in the future.