symmetric signed types

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/24/14 4:25 AM, Dominikus Dittes Scherkl wrote:
> On Friday, 24 January 2014 at 11:43:08 UTC, eles wrote:
>> On Friday, 24 January 2014 at 10:40:46 UTC, Dominikus Dittes Scherkl
>> wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 23 January 2014 at 20:35:56 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>>> int a = 2_000_000_000;
>>> int b = a + a;
>>>
>>> should not generate weird stuff like -294_967_296 (which it
>>
>> Long discussion about signed/unsigned integer overflows...
>
> But that is a HUGE source of errors, even in really carefully developed
> software in safety critical systems!
> I think it is well worth a thought to have a safe type in the language

s/language/standard library/

> --> If I write code fast, without thinking about subtleties (like e.g.
> the return type of main() in "hello world") I expect the compiler to do
> something sensible (ok, I doesn't expect if from C, but we're talking
> about a better language, do we?) and I don't expect highest performance.
>
> So I would prefer to have save signed types as default and maybe new
> types "sbyte", "sshort", "sint" etc if I need the last bit of
> performance, but without automatic conversion to those unsave types.
> Using fast signed types with all the over/underflow and other unsafe
> stuff is like manual memory management and pointers instead of GC and
> slices - useful to have in case you really need them, but not the default.

The short answer is - nagonna happen. Proposals for new standard library 
types and artifacts are of course accepted and encouraged.


Andrei