[tialaramex]

Right, certainly I don't want to single C++ out for this - I mentioned it because (a) the article we're talking about is describing a mistake the author found in some C++ code, and (b) I wanted to head off the inevitable call to blame C, yes, C++ does it because C does it (and that's probably why Java and C# do it too) but that's a choice and it's a bad choice.

Implicit conversion is always a mistake. The price in terms of reduced clarity and extra mistakes is too high for the marginal convenience of less typing.

I feel the same for boolean coercion even, which I know is more controversial than some of the really stupid C promotions, I do not believe in "truthiness". There's only one false, it's the constant false, it's not 0 or "" or 0.0 or an empty array or a null pointer or a billion other things, it's just itself and nothing else.

[tuveson]

Yeah I totally agree, it’s a bad design choice and the successors to C should not have copied it.