Signed word lengths and indexes

[Kagamin]

Walter Bright Wrote:

> > 1) I'd like D to use signed words to represent lengths and array indexes.
> 
> This would lead to silent breakage of code transferred from C and C++.

I actually wrote an application in C and used signeds for array indexes, string positions and field offsets.

> 2. For an operating system kernel's memory management logic, it still would make 
> sense to represent the address space as a flat range from 0..n, not one that's 
> split in the middle, half of which is accessed with negative offsets. D is 
> supposed to support OS development.
> 
Doesn't OS think in terms of pages? And... yes... I have 5 gigs of memory on my 32bit windows system. How can you make sense of representing it with uint length?
Not to mention that if you really need it, you *can* workaround compiler checks by declaring your own getters/ranges.