Confusion about runtime modification of variable that is not comptime-known (opens in new tab)

Hi everyone, I recently got help to resolve a confusion I had about an . Stepping away from that discussion, I had this tangential thought that is now confusing me. Suppose we define a variable var count: u8 = 1 – this is not comptime-known by virtue of not being const or comptime. Therefore, why is it necessary to give count an explicit fixed-size number type to modify the variable at runtime? Is the number type (u8 in this example) ingested at runtime in some manner? is it processed by the ...