'int' is enough for 'length' to migrate code from x86 to x64

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 11/21/2014 12:10 AM, bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>
>> All you're doing is trading 0 crossing for 0x7FFFFFFF crossing issues, and
>> pretending the problems have gone away.
>
> I'm not pretending anything. I am asking in practical programming what of the
> two solutions leads to leas problems/bugs. So far I've seen the unsigned
> solution and I've seen it's highly bug-prone.

I'm suggesting that having a bug and detecting the bug are two different things. 
The 0-crossing bug is easier to detect, but that doesn't mean that shifting the 
problem to 0x7FFFFFFF crossing bugs is making the bug count less.


>> BTW, granted the 0x7FFFFFFF problems exhibit the bugs less often, but
>> paradoxically this can make the bug worse, because then it only gets found
>> much, much later in supposedly tested & robust code.
>
> Is this true? Do you have some examples of buggy code?

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html