[DrBurrito]

The argument against unsigned is that people abuses unsigned as a way of false safety, as a form of assert. They think the number cannot go below zero or above maxvalue. But in practice it can under- and overflow, so this is a bogus assert. I think there is a valid point in this.

So, if someone does x=(0-1), signed will contain (-1) and unsigned will contain (MAXVALUE) (255 if x is char, 8 bits). The point being that (-1) is clearly wrong and invalid, and 255 is valid but wrong. The price to pay for this is one bit of reduced range (meaning, reducing the range by half).

Now, all modern processors have under- and overflow checks. It is also true that nobody uses them regularly, and that they are not easily accessible in C.

Therefore: use unsigned only for modulo arithmetic. For the rest, used signed numbers, as they behave like you would expect.

Also, the C++ Core Guidelines: https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC... https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC...