Comment by zozbot234

> However, C and many other languages decided to put a tag on the type, so operator syntax can be agnostic to signedness, and the compiler will choose the appropriate CPU instruction.

It mostly comes up with widening conversions (signed numbers must extend the sign bit, unsigned numbers set the extra bits to zero), unsigned/signed divide (and multiply, in case of a widened result) and greater than/less than comparisons (and of course geq/leq). (With signed comparison, A is less than B if by starting from INT_MIN (included) and iteratively incrementing you reach A before B. With unsigned comparison, A is less than B if by starting from 0 (included) and iteratively incrementing you reach A before B. This way of phrasing comparison as range inclusion is convenient, since it works around the wrapping concern in a rather clean way.)