For me, what’s confusing about the up-promotion of arithmetic operations is 
that you wind up with type-changes that you might not expect:

function foo()
    a = 0x01
    println(typeof(a))
    b = 0x02
    a = a + b
    println(typeof(a))
end
foo()

I still find the change in type of a to be unexpected. Obviously I can resolve 
this by doing things like,

function foo()
    a = 0x01
    println(typeof(a))
    b = 0x02
    a::Uint8 = a + b
    println(typeof(a))
end
foo()

but that leaves me with another source of confusion: when should I be asserting 
the type of a variable vs doing something like,

function foo()
    a = 0x01
    println(typeof(a))
    b = 0x02
    a = uint8(a + b)
    println(typeof(a))
end
foo()

 — John

On Mar 1, 2014, at 3:30 PM, Stefan Karpinski <ste...@karpinski.org> wrote:

> There's been many discussions of this before. The basic premise is simple: 
> all integer arithmetic is done in your native word size. When you store that 
> result somewhere, it is converted to the storage type. Since you can do most 
> operations on Int64s and then convert to Int32 and get the exact same answer, 
> this works out fine. I have yet to hear a really convincing argument for why 
> we shouldn't just do everything in native int size.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 6:26 PM, Stefan Karpinski <ste...@karpinski.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 8:49 AM, andrew cooke <and...@acooke.org> wrote:
> defining
>   Base.promote_rule(::Type{Int32}, ::Type{Int32}) = Int32
> doesn't help either, and i'm not sure why.
> 
> Promotion only applies when the types don't already have the same type. When 
> you write int32(1) + int32(2) you call this method: 
> https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/int.jl#L16, which 
> explicitly converts the values to your native Int type and then does the work.
> 

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