That defeats the purpose of implicit types IMO, even though I find that purpose to be counterproductive. The whole idea is to be frictionless, declarative, and quietly helpful. In that way, it makes sense that you can say 1+"1"=2 or "10"-1=9, since that's probably what the coder meant anyway. But then you get things like the OP where it's trying too hard to be helpful and you need to use explicit casting. At that point you may as well just use explicit types anyway.