4 ms·

> The ASCII symbol for '-' is not a suitable analog for our concept of 'negative' Why not?

• smoldesu 5y ago
  Conventional computing has no concept of positive or negative, but rather uses a signing bit to discern their polarity (for example, an 8-bit value could represent either -127-128 or 0-255). That concept of "type correctness" is lost whenever you haphazardly cast unlike values between one another (in this case ints and strings), so we're trusting the Python interpreter to magically perform this illegal, slow operation without supervision.