On Friday, 21 November 2014 at 04:53:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
BTW, granted the 0x7FFFFFFF problems exhibit the bugs less
often, but paradoxically this can make the bug worse, because
then it only gets found much, much later in supposedly tested &
robust code.
0 crossing bugs tend to show up much sooner, and often
immediately.
Wrong. Unsigned integers can hold bigger values, so it takes more
to makes them overflow, hence the bug is harder to detect.
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html
Specifically, it fails if the sum of low and high is greater
than the maximum positive int value
So it fails sooner for signed integers than for unsigned integers.
