[OT] The Usual Arithmetic Confusions

[Paulo Pinto]

On Friday, 28 January 2022 at 02:15:51 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> 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?

Not surprisingly, the system programming languages outside C 
family tend to go with explicit conversions.