Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
Don Wrote:
Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
Any opposing view would have to include what obtaining the unsigned negation of
an unsigned value is useful for. And literals don't count because they're
easily expressed otherwise :)
x & -x
Nonzero if x has has more than one bit set, ie is not a perfect power of
2. I use that often.
Fine, this would not be disallowed in my mind. The abuse is not simply
applying negation to an unsigned, it is then using the result as unsigned.
Incidentally, I always used the construct x & (x-1) to be zero if it's an exact
power of 2. It's not much different.
My opinion: unsigned types get used *far* more often than they should.
If this kind of behaviour confuses you, there's no way you should be
using unsigned.
Really, the problem is that people abuse unsigned to mean 'this is a
positive integer'. And of course, negation doesn't make sense in the
context of the naturals. But that is NOT what unsigned is. Unsigned
types are types with NO SIGN.
If unsigned types get used far more often than they should, then they shouldn't be all over the place in the standard language
(i.e. size_t is used for everything size related).
Yes, that's exactly my opinion. I think size_t being unsigned is the
primary problem.
You simply can't avoid using unsigned.
It's also useful for when you don't think you should ever receive inputs
that are negative.
That's like using double for currency. You deserve what you get.
