[tyfighter]

I just can agree with any interpretation of the article's code that believes programmers should desire silent sign extension when everything about the expression and data types involved is explicitly written to avoid signedness. At the end of the day, programming languages should naturally express intent and not rely on memorization of surprise. Here, I believe that Microsoft correctly employed principle of least surprise, and that ultimately the spec is broken and because of the amount of code in existence just can't be fixed.

[kazinator]

I completely agree that C's promotion behavior of unsigned types narrower than int going to int is wonky to a certain extent. However, introducing nonconforming exceptions to that behavior for bit fields doesn't help things. It just breaks correctly written code intended to be portable.