good find! here's a summary: it looks like they searched the standard library for negative integer literals and that's how they settled on -5 for the low end.

good find! here's a summary: it looks like they searched the standard library for negative integer literals and that's how they settled on -5 for the low end. the high end came after introducing the `bytes` object. it went up to 256 instead of just 255 for size/len checks.