Either way, you're going to have the incorrect number. When debugging, I'd rather have something that is very incorrect rather than having a mysterious off-by-o

Either way, you're going to have the incorrect number. When debugging, I'd rather have something that is very incorrect rather than having a mysterious off-by-one error. Edit: The C99 standard acknowledges that abs(INT_MIN) isn't representable, so using abs(INT_MIN) is undefined.