Jonathan M Davis wrote:
It's inevitable in any systems language. What are you going to do, throw away a bit for unsigned integers? That's not acceptable for a systems language. On some level, you must live with the fact that you're running code on a specific machine with a specific set of constraints. Trying to do otherwise will pretty much always harm efficiency. True, there are common bugs that might be better prevented, but part of it ultimately comes down to the programmer having some clue as to what they're doing. On some level, we want to prevent common bugs, but the programmer can't have their hand held all the time either.
Yup. A systems language is going to map closely onto the target machine, and that means its characteristics will show up in the language. Trying to pretend that arithmetic on integers is something other than what the CPU natively does just will not work.
