alt Hacker NewsI liked how the discussion of 'delta = x - y' moved right on to how really you usually want delta = abs(x - y), so let's talk about that instead...
Even beyond Stroustrup, Dijkstra, and Google, this whole panel of C++ luminaries agrees to prefer signed types and explains pretty clearly why:
- 12:12-13:08 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Puio5dly9N8#t=12m12s
- 42:40-45:26 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Puio5dly9N8#t=42m40s
- 1:02:50-1:03:15 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Puio5dly9N8#t=1h2m50s
Thanks for the excerpts! I was trying to understand the reasoning, which seem to just be in the 2nd excerpt:
- The rules of signed/unsigned are complicated and there is too much auto-conversion - does that mean languages that make this more explicit means this is fine? It just seems ideal to have stronger typing. - It is mentioned that you can initialized an unsigned int to "-2" - but that presumably could also be fixed in the language.
I'm trying to separate out which is "don't do this in C/C++" and which is "don't do this in any language".