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I don't think this is a "begging the question" fallacy. General purpose programming language often need to deal with binary data. This can be anything from do
by camgunz 9y ago
I don't think this is a "begging the question" fallacy. General purpose programming language often need to deal with binary data. This can be anything from documents, compressed files, images, audio, video, network data, a video framebuffer, and so on. Dealing with binary is in no way a "specialized use case" of programming; I'm honestly a little incredulous at your insinuation.
Further, this "distortion" amounts to adding 4 types and defining bitwise behavior, and since unsigned shifts are easier than signed shifts, no problem. I wouldn't call that a distortion, especially not compared to things like for-in and lambdas.
But really, can you explain your disdain for unsigned numbers? I've never heard someone argue for their exclusion from Java -- I thought we all accepted it was a mistake.
- lmm 9y agoI view extra primitives as very expensive because they add a whole bunch of extra cases in the language itself; I like small languages where as much as possible can be moved into libraries. I just don't see the use cases for unsigned ints as being widespread enough to justify having them in the language; I've worked across a number of industries and I think I've seen them used once (when fixing a bug in ffmpeg), whereas for-in and lambda are used absolutely everywhere. I'm not especially anti-unsigned; if I was designing a JVM-like bytecode I'd remove short, and perhaps even (single-precision) float and int as well.