On Sat, Aug 02, 2025 at 10:45:49AM +0200, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 2, 2025 at 9:32 AM Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 01, 2025 at 11:57:43PM +0200, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
> > > On Fri, Aug 1, 2025 at 6:01 PM Colin Ian King <colin.i.king@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > There are incorrect %u format specifiers being used to for signed integers,
> > > > fix this by using %d instead.
> > >
> > > Both of them sound to me like the fix of the symptom and not the
> > > cause. Can we simply make types of the iterators to be unsigned
> > > instead?
> >
> > Making iterator unsigned by default only increases the rate of bugs.
>
> How? Please, make sure this is relevant to this case.
You're suggesting that he should change:
- int i, j;
+ unsigned int i, j;
It's just bad advice. Making iterators unsigned makes the code less
safe. It leads underflow bugs when we do subtraction:
for (i = num - 1; i < limit; i++) {
Now i starts at UINT_MAX. Which I guess is fine in this example...
But it also leads to endless loops in the error handling:
while (i-- >= 0) {
Making iterators unsigned is a bad habbit and it's bad advice in terms
of the data that we have with regards to bugs.
regards,
dan carpenter
