Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schinde...@gmx.de> writes: >> IMHO, if you don't accompany insert_pos_as_negative_offset() with a >> corresponding extract_pos_and_found_condition() and use it everywhere, >> it is more obfuscating than necessary. > > I do disagree here. No overflow checking needs to be performed for `-1 - > <int-value>`. And that's what the opposite of this function really boils > down to.
I do not think j6t is referring to the over/underflow issues at all. The suggestion is that, because insert-pos-as-negative-offset abstracts away (in addition to the overflow checks) the fact that "does not exist but here is the location it would be inserted" is encoded in a certain way (i.e. not just the array index negated, but also is offset by -1, because we wouldn't be able to say "at the very beginning at index 0" without the -1 offset), the side that consumes the encoded "pos" (i.e. "we got a negative, so we know the element does not exist, and the index into the array we would insert a new element is computed this way") should be abstracted away, as it must know that the extra negative offset used when encoding is "-1". I think that is a reasonable thing to consider; it is not necessary for correctness, but contributes to the conceptual clarity (iow, it can be left as a separate clean-up step done after the series is done).
