An example of intransitive implicit coercions: perhaps you have designed a language such that there is an implicit coercion from Booleans to integers (perhaps producing either 0 or 1), and also an implicit coercion from nullable references to Booleans. Arguably you have already sinned, but the situation becomes far worse if you apply transitive closure to the implicit coercions, because now a nullable reference to the integer 53 can be implicitly coerced to an integer—but the integer is 1, not 53!