I used to think that way too, but there’s a good argument to be made that overflowing your integer types to negative values instead of to small (or large) posit

I used to think that way too, but there’s a good argument to be made that overflowing your integer types to negative values instead of to small (or large) positive values avoids a lot of silent bugs you’d otherwise have with unsigned types. A language solving that would need to work with static proofs of non-overflow, and have any desired overflow to be explicit. Java in the meantime has gained all the unsigned operations as methods in the Integer and Long classes, so the relatively rare cases when you need them are straightforward to handle. The only real annoyance is that byte is signed. At least there’s a bit of unsigned support in the Byte class now. Lastly, minor point, Java actually has an unsigned 16-bit integer type, called char.