<Why do arithmetic operations on bytes return an i...

# stackoverflow

[user]

Why do arithmetic operations on bytes return an int in kotlin?
Consider this code:

val x1: Byte = 0x00
val x2: Byte = 0x01
val x3: Byte = x1 + x2;


This gives a compile error, because the result of adding 2 Bytes is an Int.

To work around this, I need to manually cast the result back into a byte:

val x3: Byte = (x1 + x2).toByte()


This is very counter-intuative. Why do the arithmetic operators work like this?