Comment by xyzzyz

For the stuff I do, I rarely use signed types. I find the example of finding difference between two numbers to be really silly. I don’t recall ever having to do anything like that, for a simple reason: I design my code so that I always know which number will be larger than the other.

Let’s actually talk more about this max - min example. Let’s say you calculated this delta. What is it useful for in your code? Typically, in real algorithms, what you want is to not only know the delta, but also which number is larger.