This can’t be “by design”. No one designs something able to make 6.77 * 1000 = 6000. It is just the result of “we have lots of other bugs to fix and a proper evaluator will cost time, so let’s just document it and let apps explode around the world until they find the problem”.
That’s clearly a bug, as proven. And as said, users can avoid that trap with little cost for Xojo with them just introducing a compiler switch raising a compiler error when finding such possibility while it can’t do it correctly using some type of RTTI technique.