Mixing operations with signed and unsigned types

[bearophile]

Stewart Gordon:
> what you seem to be suggesting is that size_t be the same as ptrdiff_t.

Yes, but an unsigned word type needs to be kept in the language.


> There is, however, another problem: signed types convert implicitly to 
> unsigned types, though they do generate a warning if compiled with -w 
> (except peculiarly for int/uint).  Removing this implicit conversion 
> would break certain existing code that uses signed types where it should 
> be using unsigned.

> If we also change array indices to be signed, it 
> would break that code that sensibly uses unsigned types, which is 
> probably worse.

Yes, of course that code needs to be fixed after the change I have suggested. A "breaking change" means that some of the old code needs to be fixed.

Bye,
bearophile