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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice for the C Standard to say that `char` is unsigned. The damage done by making its signedness implementation-defined is incalculable.

(D sez `char` is unsigned. No more nonsense!)

C also needs to implement proper arrays. D does it, and that one feature is worth its weight in gold:

https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html

It's sooo nice to not have array overflows anymore.

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>nice for the C Standard to say that `char` is unsigned

i'm old school. ascii is 7 bits, if you're using the 8th bit you probably want a sign since you've left the realm of ascii chars

The right choice would probably be to make it signed because everything is an int in trad C and all other trad types are signed unless explicitly specified as unsigned.

Not that I disagree with making basic types unsigned by default, just not in C.

Ah so Java did the right decision with signed bytes! /s

That would be the self-consistent choice. But it is debatable that it is the right choice when things like the <ctype.h> functions sometimes fall over, either accidentally or deliberately, if erroneously given a signed char, and sign extension can sometimes accidentally yield an EOF value.

I haven't run across a C compiler that defaults to signed char in a looong time. It's time to discard signed char so people can write portable V by default. Use signed char if and when it is needed.

I bet a lot of existing C code will break if one sets char to signed with a compiler switch.

Anybody reviewing C code and sees just char will have to waste time wondering if the code handles the implementation-defined signed-ness correctly.

And yes, I know about stdint.h, a poor attempt to deal with this problem.

...I guess you don't use any C compilers targeting x86-64 then? Cause on all the main configurations in my testing (gcc+linux, clang+linux, clang+windows, msvc+windows) x86-64 uses signed char. As such more programs probably break with forced unsigned char than signed char.

I checked and you're right. It's been a long time since I've programmed in C. I shall have myself flogged forthwith.

it's one of the ABI differences between x86 and arm. on arm, char is an unsigned char

It makes no sense for a character type to be signed. This is why D has:

    char - unsigned 8 bits
    byte - signed 8 bits
    ubyte - unsigned 8 bits

char is used for utf-8, byte and ubyte are signed and unsigned small integers. This seems like small thing, but it makes D code much more readable than C.

But the VAX really, really wants to make it signed.

The VAX is a relic.

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