This would have major fallout across the codebase, but I think would improve things. I was just recently authoring a patch and ran across the following strange behavior.

The correct way to build a BSON object with MinKey and MaxKey for testing is like so:

BSON("" << MINKEY << "" << MAXKEY)

But this code actually compiles also:

BSON("" << MinKey << "" << MaxKey)

After several minutes or maybe an hour of insanity, I realized that when I typed the second one I had actually constructed this object:

{"": -1, "": 127}

because it was reading from the BSONType enum and converting to an integer...

I do not think I will be the last person to make this mistake in a test.