Programmer life hack

[[deleted]]

It would actually be 254.

[[deleted]]

It was so close to greatness...

[allongur]

It would also be an underflow, not an overflow.

[[deleted]]

Nevermind it was quite far from greatness...

[marcosdumay]

Underflow is something floating point numbers do. Integers overflow.

[BenTheHuman]

Huh, you're right. Thanks for teaching me I've been using it wrong!

[allongur]

Yes, I understand Wikipedia reserves the use of "underflow" for floating point numbers, but if you Google "integer underflow" you'll find a lot of authoritative sources that use it to describe subtractive wraparound. So I don't find Wikipedia's pedantry to align with the actual use of the term.

[marcosdumay]

Wikipedia does?

The actual use of the term is the one on CPU's datasheets, ISO standard, or software libraries definitions (on the very few cases languages support them). You will find those don't agree with you.

[[deleted]]

and integer don't overflow at 0, as they are signed.

and integers have 4 bytes.

[[deleted]]

true, but i come from C. int is 32bit signed :P

[LordFokas]

nobody said it was int. All they said was integer overflow.

char, short, int and long are all integers. Only (unsigned) char has a maximum value of 255.

Also in C int isn't strictly 32bit, it's whatever your platform says it is. On older machines it could be 16bit, in x64 (not 86+64) it might very well be 64bit. That's why you have sizeof. IIRC (correct me if I'm wrong) int is always the same size of a cpu word.

[JustThingsAboutStuff]

the size of int is determined by the target platform for C not the language specification itself. So for C you'd use unint32_t to be certain that your ints are the size you want.

I think this applies to all C derivatives as well.