[pjmlp]

Java doesn't have unsigned as primitive types, because James Gosling did a series of interviews at Sun among "expert" C devs, and all got the C language rules for unsigned arithmetic wrong.

Yes I miss them in Java as primitives, however there are utility methods for unsigned arithmetic, that get it right.

[jstimpfle]

The way he conducted those interviews, and the conclusions he drew from them, may have been flawed. Because the situation now is that C has unsigned types and Java mostly has not.

And despite all pitfalls especially around mixing signed and unsigned in C, unsigned types are very useful, I'd in fact say that for low-level programming they are essential.

[pjmlp]

Doesn't seem to affect the extent Java is used across the industry, including many workloads that in the last century companies would use C instead.

Books like Yourdon Structured Method were mainly targeted to business C back in the day.

[__s]

He could've removed implicit signed conversion

[layer8]

Java has char as an unsigned 16-bit integer type. They should have made byte unsigned as well.

[pjmlp]

Usually you don't do arithmetic with char in Java, this isn't C culture of anything goes.

[uecker]

It is not even possible to do arithmetic on char in C.

[pjmlp]

    #include <stdio.h>

    unsigned int pack_rgb(unsigned char r, unsigned char g, unsigned char b) {
        return (r << 16) | (g << 8) | b;
    }

    unsigned int pack_rgb_arith(unsigned char r, unsigned char g, unsigned char b) {
        return (r * 65536) + (g * 256) + b;
    }

    int main(void)
    {
        printf("The color value of (246, 176, 223) is %d\n", pack_rgb(246, 176, 223));
        printf("The color value of (246, 176, 223) is %d\n", pack_rgb_arith(246, 176, 223));
    }

Compiler Explorer link, https://godbolt.org/z/3jExdaTT9

I would expect a better comment from someone working on the standard.

[uecker]

You should know that the type is promoted to int first, which is also what makes your example work. This is what happens when you perform the computation using an non-promoting 8 bit unsigned type: https://godbolt.org/z/fxxva4nWq

[3836293648]

Don't they get promoted to short?

[layer8]

There’s nothing preventing you from doing so.

[pjmlp]

I did not say otherwise, I said the culture is not the same towards safety.