[OT] The Usual Arithmetic Confusions

[Paul Backus]

https://shafik.github.io/c++/2021/12/30/usual_arithmetic_confusions.html

> There are a lot of aspects of C++ that are not well understood 
> and lead to all sorts of confusion. The *usual arithmetic 
> conversions* and the *integral promotions* are two such 
> aspects. [...] This is one of the areas in C++ that comes 
> directly from C, so pretty much all of these examples applies 
> to C as well as C++.

Unfortunately, this is also one of the areas of D that comes 
directly from C, so D programmers have to watch out for these as 
well.

It's been argued in the past, on these forums, that these 
conversions are "just something you have to learn" if you want to 
do system-level programming. But if C++ programmers are still 
getting this stuff wrong, after all these years, perhaps the 
programmers aren't the problem. Is it possible that these 
implicit conversions are just too inherently error-prone for 
programmers to reliably use correctly?