IMHO it's only weird because the promotion is to 32-bit integers on 64-bit platforms. If all math would happen on the natural word size (e.g. 64-bits), and spec

IMHO it's only weird because the promotion is to 32-bit integers on 64-bit platforms. If all math would happen on the natural word size (e.g. 64-bits), and specific integer widths would only matter for memory loads/stores, it would be fine.