Is this reasonable?

[Ary Borenszweig]

On 12/5/13 4:35 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2013 at 03:47:27PM -0300, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> [...]
>> Cough, cough, make array length be an int.
>>
>> Do you really need arrays that big? :-S
>>
>> (I'm talking to Mr. D Compiler here)
>
> A negative length array makes no sense.

Of course not. And it will never be negative. But make it signed and all 
the problems everyone is having several times every month will be gone 
forever.

>
> Plus, being a systems language, D should be able to represent an entire
> 64-bit address space as an array of ubytes (even if this is rarely
> done!). If one were to write a kernel in D, it would be laughable to use
> signed array lengths.

You can use raw pointers for that if you are going to write a kernel in 
D. Or you can make a struct that wraps a pointer and length, make it 
uint and that's it.

But to make array.length uint by default and have these surprises all of 
the time just because "a negative length doesn't make sense"... I don't 
know, I feel it's not the right way to do it.