On Friday, March 29, 2013 17:27:10 Minas Mina wrote: > Consider: > uint u = ...; > int x = u; > > Wouldn't a warning be enough?
No. -w makes it so that warnings are errors, so you generally can't make anything a warning unless you're willing for it to be treated as an error at least some of the time (and a lot of people compile with -w), and this sort of thing is _supposed_ to work without a warning - primarily because if it doesn't, you're forced to cast all over the place when you're dealing with both signed and unsigned types, and the casts actually make your code more error-prone, because you could end up casting something other than uint to int or int to uint by accident (e.g. long to uint) and end up with bugs due to that. There are definitely cases where it would be nice to warn about conversions between signed and unsigned values, but there's a definite cost to it as well, so the situation is not at all clear cut. - Jonathan M Davis
