[OT] The Usual Arithmetic Confusions

[Paulo Pinto]

On Friday, 4 February 2022 at 09:19:38 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Friday, 4 February 2022 at 04:28:37 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 2/3/2022 8:25 AM, Paul Backus wrote:
>>> The inconsistency is the problem here. Having integer types 
>>> behave differently depending on their width makes the 
>>> language harder to learn,
>>
>> ...
>
> I don't think this is limited to learning. I don't think 
> programmers with decades of experience with C/C++ has a problem 
> understanding 2s-complement, but it is still creating 
> annoyances and friction.
> ...

Gosling experience at kind of proved otherwise,

"In programming language design, one of the standard problems is 
that the language grows so complex that nobody can understand it. 
One of the little experiments I tried was asking people about the 
rules for unsigned arithmetic in C. It turns out nobody 
understands how unsigned arithmetic in C works. There are a few 
obvious things that people understand, but many people don't 
understand it."

https://www.artima.com/articles/james-gosling-on-java-may-2001

Then again, maybe Sun lacked enough people with decades of C and 
C++ experience, and someone with the track record of Gosling 
across the computing industry does have any clue about what he 
was talking about.