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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: strtoul("-10", ...)
Message-ID: <13420@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 26 Jul 90 19:22:07 GMT
References: <GAFTER.90Jul24163928@m2.csc.ti.com>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 10

In article <GAFTER.90Jul24163928@m2.csc.ti.com> <gafter@csc.ti.com> (Neal M Gafter) writes:
>...  I presumed the sentence about the minus sign was to
>allow the string "-0" and to recognize (as errors) other negative
>numbers.

No, in fact this was discussed at the last X3J11 interpretation meeting.
The negation is modulo longwordsize, and thus cannot overflow if the
conversion of the portion after the "-" prefix did not overflow.  (By
"overflow" I mean that the converted value value is not representable
in an unsigned long datum.)