float init 0 request

[Walter Bright]

Casting is a hammer that overrides the type system. Hence one can plausibly 
argue that every cast is a bug in the program, or at least shows the programmer 
didn't do a good job selecting types properly. In my own code, I try to select 
types to minimize a need for casting.

Implicit conversions, however, are a "soft" conversion rather than a hammer. C 
is a bit too loose with that, as such can do hidden truncations. D's design is 
better because of Value Range Propagation.

Before C, I programmed in Wirth's Pascal. It all looked good in the manual, but 
in practice it was a horrible language. There were no implicit conversions, 
everything had to be constantly cast back and forth. So the hammer is 
everywhere. I disliked it strongly, and I think that was a big mistake in 
Pascal's design.

I've also always disliked C's "char" type because it is how one gets a byte 
integer, having nothing to do with characters. D fixes that.

But integral promotions are still retained, because doing integer operations on 
char's is not that unusual (such as upper/lower case conversions).

All in all, D's semantic selections for integral types are better than anyone 
else's for type safety and convenience.