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by Joker_vD 1170 days ago
There is a lovely piece of text in the third version of PNG specification: "PNG four-byte unsigned integers are limited to the range 0 to 2^31-1 to accommodate languages that have difficulty with unsigned four-byte values" [0]. Gee, I wonder what languages those may be?

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/WD-png-3-20221025/#7Integers-and-...
2 comments
account42 1170 days ago
The answer is Java, not C(++).
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dahfizz 1170 days ago
C has no problem dealing with a uint32_t. Not sure what you are getting at.

This is more of an issue with languages like java that abstract away integer widths and signs, which is convenient if you're only doing arithmetic but becomes a huge pain when dealing with binary data.

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