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It's "in order to accommodate languages that have difficulty with unsigned four-byte values" ie. Java.

That makes more sense

Mostly just a joke at C's expense. When reviewing C code, any time the sign-bit gets touched I consider the danger zone to have been entered (especially in the context of parsing data). Limiting the range of ints is a good defensive programming tactic.

As another commenter points out, the real reason is about practicality - some languages like Java don't natively support unsigned ints.

Maybe I'm old, but i dont get it. I'd say signed is more dangerous as the overflow is undefined. And if you read to unsigned, you are just wasting range.

Yes, that's the point. Signed ints are a potential footgun, which can be partially mitigated by limiting the range to 0 - 2^31-1.

Good specs pre-emptively mitigate implementation bugs.

Yeah I found that part a bit opaque as well. What about alignment? Does it just use 4 byte integers but one bit is unused? Isn't that a much more clear way of putting it?