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>Adding two ints could overflow to a long, so that probably isn't a good argument. Based on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11853602/c-sharp-does-not-let-me-sum-two-shorts-to-a-short, it looks like there is no + operator assigned for shorts, so they get promoted to ints, and the result is therefore an int.

I like that answer better <g> - yeah, I assumed the compiler was doing some overflow checking with the Convert call, since having the compiler do that anywhere else would make it difficult to do basic math.