On 5/16/25 12:19 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Basically, `a + 5` gets promoted to int, and that's why it can't be
> assigned back to `a`. (Don't ask me why, that's just the way it is and
> Walter has refused and probably will continue to refuse to change it.)
Overloaded functions must also be considered. I doubt there is any code
out there that would start behaving unexpectedly with such a change but
the following code might be dispatched to another function:
foo(a + 5);
Related: Template instantiation...
And what if ubyte and int appeared in the same expression:
int i;
a + 5 + i;
If the rules were changed, we would still expect the expression to be
int I guess. But then, wasn't 5 an int with today's rules? With the
proposed change, we would still be following the same rule; roughly: the
type of the largest expression...
Such messy rules of programming languages are not easy to clean up and
there are natural reasons why they are messy. I agree with Walter that
the best action is to follow what other system programming languages do
in this case.
Ali
