This is one of those "If everyone would just do X" kinds of situations, which is why I'm against it. Things go wrong all the time - in fact it's a miracle anyth

This is one of those "If everyone would just do X" kinds of situations, which is why I'm against it. Things go wrong all the time - in fact it's a miracle anything works at all. So when I see "code that needs to be written to prevent it", I let out a sardonic laugh; people just don't work that way. People WILL forget to check, or implement the check wrong (and it won't be discovered until the next black swan event), or some invariant will change in future and nobody will know to update this code. The code doesn't care because the compiler doesn't enforce the invariants, so you're left with bare and likely confusing (and probably eventually undefined) behavior. I for one would LOVE it if popular languages could be instructed to inject invariant enforcement code (not asserts) at certain boundaries. It would help with a whole host of problems! When you cross zero with a signed integer calculation, it's easy to find out, and the code has low cognitive overhead. Also, with code generally structured this way, bad input propagation tends to get stopped earlier because of the number of functions that check against negative values. It's also possible to underflow check with unsigned, but the code is more complicated and can't stop propagation if it fails, and if you are allowing values > the signed positive limit (or unwittingly allowing it), your overflow detection code gets even more complicated (or wrong) due to the reduced overhead space. You COULD do a bunch of checks beforehand, but that's not always feasible due to the combination of operations being done on the operands, and once again people are people. Even though many modern languages block uncast type conversions, that still doesn't protect you from converting a negative integer to an unsigned integer. Yes, you SHOULD be checking before the cast, buuuuuuut... What we want to do is reduce the number of ways things can go wrong, reduce the fallout of an errant process, and minimize cognitive load to reduce bugs overall. Making that worse just to double the positive integer space doesn't make sense to me.