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I dislike implicit type conversions, but I think every cast needs to be accompanied by an assertion. Just sprinkling casts everywhere does nothing but silence important compiler warnings.

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>> I dislike implicit type conversions...

What do you think of "auto" in C++ ?

'auto' is only available to use when the type of a variable can be automatically deduced from its initializer, meaning the declaration would be redundant. It has nothing to do with type conversions.

edit: now I see what you mean in the context of adding assertions to make type conversions safer, and how there could be some parallels with auto for that

It's an example of making something explicit implicit.

Whatever the answer, it won't surface a contradiction; but that doesn't mean it's not an interesting, obliquely related question.

It's implicit declaration, which seems worse in some ways than implicit conversions. After a conversion you know what type you have even if not the type you started with.

Not the parent, but `auto` in c++ improves the situation wrt implicit conversions as variables now automatically get the type of the thing assigned to them. IOW: less unintentional implicit conversions.

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