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

[Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d]

Am Thu, 20 Nov 2014 20:53:31 -0800
schrieb Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>:

> On 11/20/2014 7:11 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> > On 11/20/2014 3:25 PM, bearophile wrote:
> >> Walter Bright:
> >>
> >>> If that is changed to a signed type, then you'll have a same-only-different
> >>> set of subtle bugs,
> >>
> >> This is possible. Can you show some of the bugs, we can discuss them, and see if
> >> they are actually worse than the current situation.
> >
> > All you're doing is trading 0 crossing for 0x7FFFFFFF crossing issues, and
> > pretending the problems have gone away.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 0 crossing bugs tend to show up much sooner, and often immediately.

 +1000. This is also the reason we have a special float .init in D.
There is no plethora of bugs to show, because they are under
the radar. Signed types are only more convenient in the
scripting language sense, like using double for everything and
array indexing in JavaScript.

-- 
Marco