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From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Why should "sizeof" be unsigned?
Message-ID: <2231@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 1-Jul-87 17:56:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: mmintl.2231
Posted: Wed Jul  1 17:56:49 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Jul-87 13:19:59 EDT
References: <1748@plus5.UUCP> <586@haddock.UUCP> <1750@plus5.UUCP> <1557@sfsup.UUCP> <22242@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT.
Lines: 21

In article <22242@sun.uucp> guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
|The complaint being made is that having "sizeof" yield a value of
|type "unsigned int", rather than "int", precludes having -1 as an
|out-of-band value for routines that normally take a "sizeof".  Saying
|"'sizeof' yields a value of type 'unsigned int', so you can't use -1
|as an out-of-band value anyway" doesn't argue that the complaint is
|invalid, it just points out why the complaint is being made in the
|first place!  (I have no strong opinion either way on this.  I merely
|point out that "the type of 'sizeof' is 'unsigned int'" is not, by
|itself, a valid argument against the proposition that it should be
|"int".)

The point nobody seemed to notice is that on some machines, sizeof *has* to
be unsigned -- "int" isn't big enough.  Thus code which uses -1 as an out-
of-band value in an integer holding a sizeof result is not portable.  A
standardization which causes non-portable code to no longer compile is a
good thing.
-- 

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Ashton-Tate          52 Oakland Ave North         E. Hartford, CT 06108