Is this reasonable?

eles eles at eles.com
Thu Dec 5 13:33:29 PST 2013


On Thursday, 5 December 2013 at 19:51:52 UTC, Ary Borenszweig 
wrote:
> On 12/5/13 4:35 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 03:47:27PM -0300, Ary Borenszweig 
>> wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Cough, cough, make array length be an int.
>>>
>>> Do you really need arrays that big? :-S
>>>
>>> (I'm talking to Mr. D Compiler here)
>>
>> A negative length array makes no sense.
>
> Of course not. And it will never be negative. But make it 
> signed and all the problems everyone is having several times 
> every month will be gone forever.

I defended once the approach took by FreePascal: they declared a 
signed integer that covered the larges available range on a 
machine (now it occurred to me that the compiler could even cover 
*twice* that range with a simple trick) and then, all other 
integer types, signed or unsigned/positive were sub-ranges of the 
first. Comparisons were made at this largest level.

I dunno how complicated and how much overhead for this.


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