The lack of memory safe casts drives me a bit batty.

You would think casting something as signed or unsigned wouldn't promote to a int / unsigned int. Ditto for const and unconst.

When the first C++ Standard (C89) was being created, about half the compilers implemented "sign preserving" semantics, which is what you're advocating, and the other half implemented "value preserving" semantics.

A great battle ensued, and many champions were slain.

The value preserving folks carried the field, and the sign preserving folks changed their compilers.