Re: Advice on Unsigned Types

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

Followup to:  <3B8EF269.BF457C7F@home.com>
By author:    John Kacur <jkacur@home.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
> 
> The advice the author give on Unsigned Types is:
> "Avoid unnecessary complexity by minimizing your use of unsigned types.
> Specifically, don't use an unsigned type to represent a quantity just
> because it will never be negative (e.g."age" or "national debt").
> Use a signed type like int and you won't have to worry about boundary
> cases in the detailed rules for promoting mixed types.
> Only use unsigned types for bitfields or binary masks. Use casts in
> expressions, to make all the operands signed or unsigned, so the
> compiler does not have to choose the result type."
> 

So the author isn't talking about developing operating systems.  In
operating systems it's almost the other way around -- signed is really
the exception.

	-hpa
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