I’m sure unsigned int has had its place in the eons gone by; however, I think it’s outlived it’s useful lifespan. The number of times I’ve tried to do math with it and shot myself in the foot is quite astonishing. The root of the problem is you simply can’t do subtraction and expect sane results because it will underflow. Let’s take a look at an innoculous piece of code.<\/p>\n
\/\/ Process all but the last element in the queue<\/p>\n
for (int i =\u00a0 0; i < queue.size()-1; i++)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
All we want to do here is process all the items in a queue except the last one. And since we’ve declared our counter as int, everything should be fine, right? If there is nothing in the array, queue.size()-1 will be 0-1 which evaluates to -1 and will not satisfiy the loop condition.<\/p>\n
However, this crashes. Why? Because I discovered queue.size() returns an unsigned int. And of course with unsigned int, only positive numbers are represented so when you do 0-1, the result will not be -1 but 4294967295. Brilliant, now my loop will execute 4 billion times when the queue is empty. Ahhh! Why would people code like this? If you need more than 2 billion items (the max size of a normal int), and use unsigned int instead, chances are the max size of 4 billion won’t be sufficient anyhow.<\/p>\n
In conclusion, if I had to re-design C or C++, I would totally leave out unsigned int. Or at least re-define the underflow\/overflow behavior so that 0-1 in unsigned int land will trigger an underflow and automatically reset the result to 0. Disabling the underflow\/overflow behavior by default would also prevent your treasury from becoming -32768 gold if you gain too much money in Civilization II.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m sure unsigned int has had its place in the eons gone by; however, I think it’s outlived it’s useful…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cc","category-code"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1314,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions\/1314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.briancbecker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}