[oclug]comparison warning

[Francis J. A. Pinteric]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 10:55:52 -0500 (EST)
"Rod Giffin" <rod at giffinscientific.com> wrote:

> Shad Young said:
> > warning: comparison between signed and unsigned integer expressions
> >
> > Why is this bad?
> 
> It's not necessarily bad, which is why it's only a warning instead of
> an error.  The warning is just to draw your attention to something
> that might be a logic error.
>

There's another reason as well. Signed integers are, as the name
implies, signed. They have a positive and negative value, while unsigned
integers have only positive values. However, they share the same number
of bits, although the hardware representations of the two are different.

For 16-bit signed integers, the values range from -32768 to +32767. For
the same sized unsigned integers, the value is in the range of 0 to
65535. By mixing the two types together you can get confusing results.

For instance, take the following C programme:

main()
{
	short		x;
	unsigned short	y, z;

	x = -10;
	y = 15;
	z = x;
	if( y > z )
		printf("y > z\n");
	else
		printf("y < zx\n");
}

What will happen? Compile it and find out. The result may surprise you.

That's the problem of assigning signed variables to unsigned variables
and vice versa.

>>>--fja->

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