I agree completely with you, Hugo. I hate implicit conversions because they lead to all kinds of problems while your code is in production. Conversions from varchars to datetimes to numericals and back or in any random order are just inviting errors or unexpected results. Now why can't the SQL team deprecate many of these allowed conversions? Are they mandated by ANSI-SQL?

I see the need to convert varchars to datetime/datetime2/date/time, but then the format of the permissible input strings should be well-defined as well. I keep on struggling figuring out in all kinds of sample code or questions posted in this forum whether a string representation of a date is supposed to be DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY. Why not disallow such kinds of a conversion and make the ISO 8601 standard the only allowable input format in SQL 11? Come to it, I also hate these kinds of QotD's where one is asked what the result would be where types of operands are mixed and used in "arithmetic" operations. They are just teaching people very bad habits. But OK, I'm going off-topic here... 😉