On Thursday, 20 November 2014 at 20:17:15 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
On Thursday, 20 November 2014 at 15:55:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
Using unsigned types for array length doesn't necessarily lead
to subtle
bugs, if the language was stricter about mixing signed and
unsigned
values.
Yes, I think that this is the real issue.
Thirded.
Array lengths are always non-negative integers. This is
axiomatic. But the subtraction thing keeps coming up in this
thread; what to do?
There's probably something fundamentally wrong with this and I'll
probably be called an idiot by both "sides", but my gut feeling
is that if expressions with subtraction simply returned a signed
type by default, much of the problem would disappear. It doesn't
catch everything and stuff like:
uint x = 2;
uint y = 4;
uint z = x - y;
...is still going to overflow, but maybe you know what you're
doing? More importantly, changing it to auto z = x - y; actually
works as expected for the majority of cases. (I'm actually on
the fence re: pass/warn/error on mixing, but I _will_ note C's
promotion rules have bitten me in the ass a few times and I have
no particular love for them.)
-Wyatt
PS: I can't even believe how this thread has blown up,
considering how it started.
