Yea, I've seen that explanation before, but it smells a lot like "postdiction" where you make up an explanation after the fact. I find it very hard to believe

Yea, I've seen that explanation before, but it smells a lot like "postdiction" where you make up an explanation after the fact. I find it very hard to believe that "almost no C developer" understands unsigned arithmetic. And I'd doubt you'd get any argument from someone who understands both signed and unsigned, that signed arithmetic is the harder to understand of the two. But, even if he were correct, it still doesn't make sense, as abstracting away the complexity of common operations is exactly what high level languages are for.