> Make the first input type a candidate type. Each subsequent input type is > compared to the current candidate, with a new candidate being chosen only > when there exists a non-mutal implicit cast to the new type. If at any > point a preferred type is made a candidate then it will be chosen.
So this is just a verbatim statement of the algorithm, which is what I was hoping to avoid :-(. But maybe there's no simpler way.
I got nothin'. The locking onto the preferred type is conditional on one being chosen and there doesn't seem to be any greater principle that emerges from the pairwise matching algorithm - at least given that implicit casts are essentially randomly distributed and the algorithm is order-dependent.