To be honest, I adapted a phrase I usually use for floating point numbers. But anyway, "So making ints signed makes the most sense otherwise there's an impedan

To be honest, I adapted a phrase I usually use for floating point numbers. But anyway, "So making ints signed makes the most sense otherwise there's an impedance mismatch that you need to explain away" is a pretty poor argument when you're dealing with Z_2^32 (or 2^64) minus 2^31, with some operations becoming partial. (And that's assuming you're on a twos-complement machine; those goofy ones-complement boxes had positive and negative zero.)