Lints, Condate and bugs

[KennyTM~]

On Oct 27, 10 17:53, Walter Bright wrote:
> Don wrote:
>> I would strongly support that. But it doesn't really work.
>> The problem is size_t. The fact that it's unsigned is a root of all
>> kinds of evil. It means .length is unsigned!!!
>> Personally I think that any creation or access to an object which is
>> larger in size than half the memory space, should be impossible
>> without a special function call. Providing syntax sugar for this
>> incredibly rare scenario introduces a plethora of bugs.
>
> size_t is unsigned to line up with C's. ptrdiff_t is the signed version.
> You can do things like:
>
> ptrdiff_t d = a.length;
>
> Making size_t signed would have consequences that are largely unknown.

Why .length cannot return a signed integer (not size_t) by default?