[userbinator]

such as accidentally performing arithmetic on memory that should be treated as a byte value

My reaction to that can be summed up succinctly as "WTF!?" The whole point of uint8_t or (signed/unsigned) char is an 8-bit quantity that you can do arithmetic and bitwise operations on. To put it more bluntly, "have C++ programmers forgotten how computers work?"

The proposed solution is to add yet another same-yet-subtly-different type, with its own set of same-yet-subtly-different rules? If anything that would cause even more confusion due to the complexity it causes in interactions with all the other parts of the language.

IMHO this "let's do everything we can to stop people from even the very slightest change of possibly doing something wrong" line of thinking is ultimately unproductive... and actually rather dystopian. The end-result is quite scary to contemplate.

(The fact that an 11-page, text-only PDF somehow turns out to be over 800KB is somewhat less disturbing, but still notable.)

[SamReidHughes]

It's just a bit of type safety. Calm down.