With that said, C programmers also seem to love their implicit behavior so it's pretty clear where this kind of thinking comes from.
Only if you ignore your compiler output: Even TinyCC will warn about that one on default settings. With the flags I use, the code would in fact fail to compile.
Also, I agree that implicit conversions in general should be avoided, but this complex number example feels like the perfect use case.
complex c = 4;
The issue with C++ is that implicit is the default, not that it exists.
If your data type implements the Num typeclass, you can use literals like 4. (A typeclass in Haskell is similar to what they call an interface in Java.)
There's no automatic conversion happening at all. It's done via overloading literals at compile time. (You can do the same for strings.)
What it doesn't solve that by default the compiler tries to find an appropriate implicit conversion. Sometimes it's convenient, sometimes it's harder to see what the code actually does.
Yes, the implicit conversion for all values is part of the problem. The Haskell approach only gives you magic for literals.
What? C will happily compile this:
C++ has no such _craziness_. Your strawman actually has pretty good uses: Would you rather have the last line not compile because 4 is not a complex number? Because one _could_ argue that 4 is a complex number, and C++ can represent this with an implicit constructor.The issue with C++ is that implicit is the default, not that it exists.