In one of James Gosling's talks he tells a funny story about the origin of this design decision. He went around the office at Sun and gave a bunch of seasoned C programmers a written assessment on signed/unsigned integer behaviors. They all got horrible scores, so he decided the feature would be too complicated for a non-systems programming language.
Non-systems languages still need to interact with systems languages, over the network or directly. The lack of unsigned types makes this way more painful and error-prone than necessary.
It’s rare I have to do bit math but it’s so INCREDIBLY frustrating because you have to do everything while the values are signed.
It is amazing they haven’t made a special type for that. I get they don’t want to make unsigned primitives, though I disagree, but at least makes something that makes this stuff possible without causing headaches.
Sometimes I'd like to have unsigned types too, but supporting it would actually make things more complicated overall. The main problem is the interaction between signed and unsigned types. If you call a method which returns an unsigned int, how do you safely pass it to a method which accepts a signed int? Or vice versa?
Having more type conversion headaches is a worse problem than having to use `& 0xff` masks when doing less-common, low-level operations.
I think the only answer would be you can’t interact directly with signed stuff. “new uint(42)” or “ulong.valueOf(795364)” or “myUValue.tryToInt()” or something.
Of course if you’re gonna have that much friction it becomes questionable how useful the whole thing is.
It’s just my personal pain point. Like I said I haven’t had to do it much but when I have it’s about the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done in Java.
In one of James Gosling's talks he tells a funny story about the origin of this design decision. He went around the office at Sun and gave a bunch of seasoned C programmers a written assessment on signed/unsigned integer behaviors. They all got horrible scores, so he decided the feature would be too complicated for a non-systems programming language.
Non-systems languages still need to interact with systems languages, over the network or directly. The lack of unsigned types makes this way more painful and error-prone than necessary.
It’s rare I have to do bit math but it’s so INCREDIBLY frustrating because you have to do everything while the values are signed.
It is amazing they haven’t made a special type for that. I get they don’t want to make unsigned primitives, though I disagree, but at least makes something that makes this stuff possible without causing headaches.
Sometimes I'd like to have unsigned types too, but supporting it would actually make things more complicated overall. The main problem is the interaction between signed and unsigned types. If you call a method which returns an unsigned int, how do you safely pass it to a method which accepts a signed int? Or vice versa?
Having more type conversion headaches is a worse problem than having to use `& 0xff` masks when doing less-common, low-level operations.
> If you call a method which returns an unsigned int, how do you safely pass it to a method which accepts a signed int?
The same way you pass a 64-bit integer to a function that expects a 32-bit integer: a conversion function that raises an error if it's out of range.
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Like I said, I understand why they don’t.
I think the only answer would be you can’t interact directly with signed stuff. “new uint(42)” or “ulong.valueOf(795364)” or “myUValue.tryToInt()” or something.
Of course if you’re gonna have that much friction it becomes questionable how useful the whole thing is.
It’s just my personal pain point. Like I said I haven’t had to do it much but when I have it’s about the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done in Java.