[thaumasiotes]

> Ultimately not a good design choice, but the fact that it actually wasn't that limiting and relatively few people care or notice

It was a horrific design choice, and people do notice and do hate it.

Not so much because of how it applies to ints, but because the design choice Java made was to not support any unsigned integer types. So the byte type is signed, conveniently offering you a range of values from -128 to 127. Try comparing a byte to the literal 0xA0. Try initializing a byte to 0xA0!

In contrast, C# more sensibly offers the types int / uint, short / ushort, long / ulong, and byte / sbyte.