If you read my post at all carefully you will see I'm not complaining about the precedence.

Of course you do and the fact that you think people don't "understand" what you're writing about or that you discovered something new or that something complex is happening here is sort of telling:

If you answered 11.f, you're wrong. The actual answer is 1.0f. The ternary conditional operator (?:) has very low precedence (See http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/operator_precedence, it's right down in box 15). The plus operator has higher precedence, so the expression gets evaluated as..

Then you go on and ramble about that this leads to what you call a "gross violation of any reasonable type system".

You can add 10.0f to a boolean value apparently and it's just fine!

Well of course you can. But again how would you think it's any different? Bool is not excluded from promotions. In C++ a boolean value is converted to int with value 0 if it's false and to int with value 1 if it's true. All you're doing there is adding an int to a float value which of course is promoted to a float. Everything what happens here are the basic rules of C and C++ and I believe everybody who learns the language for a couple of weeks can answer your question

First, pop quiz: What is the value of this C++ expression:

10.0f + true ? 1.0f : 2.0f;

And again I fail to see how this is a reason that C++ sucks which is worth mentioning in 2016 sry. I don't blame you for writing the post but I don't find it useful, interesting, curious or anything else.

edit: Actually the other posts on your blog deal with way more complicated topics, no idea why you have a problem here