It took me a couple of readings to make sure I understood what you were saying, thanks for the reply. I think my misunderstanding was from not knowing Julia and thinking about promotion of values as having a permanent effect on the variables used, which isn’t what’s happening. As well, it requires the user to understand what they’re doing when they’re using an operator that uses automatic promotion, and to think about what they want to happen. For example, if Int8 = -10 and UInt16 = 5, and I’m expecting an answer of -5, then I’ll need to be more explicit to get the number I’m looking for. If I’m expecting 65530, then the implicit promotion works fine. Of course, this is no different from any other programming language that allows addition of differing types.
Great point on the path dependence.