I was unclear in the article, but in my defense I wrote it in a hurry on the couch after seeing the convoluted backwards loop an llm had extruded. I meant if you are actually doing something with the index variable other than indexing. Mixing signed and unsigned types, possibly of different sizes, has surprising behavior to many programmers who don’t have the “usual arithmetic conversions” memorized. If you’re working in size_t the result simplifies: everything becomes size_t. And you generally have size_t anyway as you’re using the result of sizeof or an allocation size passed to your allocation function.
In general I want to avoid signed types for counts and sizes as then you have to consider both boundary conditions which is easy to mess up.
In general I want to avoid signed types for counts and sizes as then you have to consider both boundary conditions which is easy to mess up.