# A plea for int overflow checking as the default

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-plea-for-int-overflow-checking-as-the-default/3338>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Tags:** question, proposal, integer-overflow\
**Created:** [April 22, 2017, 3:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-plea-for-int-overflow-checking-as-the-default/3338 "2017-04-22T15:49:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 46

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**Author:** ![Olof\_Salberger](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/olof_salberger/32/4850_2.png) [@Olof\_Salberger](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Olof_Salberger)\
**Post date:** [October 14, 2017, 11:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/a-plea-for-int-overflow-checking-as-the-default/3338/46 "2017-10-14T23:31:17Z")

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More generally, would it be possible to have some equivalent of type inference for Integer and float literals? Literals are generally one of the bits of Julia that I find most annoying.

For example, if I write x = 101, it would be great if 101 parsed as an int16 if x known to be a 16 bit integer, or a 64 bit integer if x is known to be a 64 bit integer.

Maybe create a special type called “Literal” which promotes to other numeric types as soon as it is used in some other compound expression? So that I can write y = 1 - x instead of y = one(x) - x . In that system, the 1 would be of type NumericLiteral{“1”}. Whenever it is used in any primitive numeric operation, it would promote to the type of the other argument, or to some default type. This would also make it a lot harder to write code that isn’t type stable.

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