Signed Characters

Henry Spencer henry at utzoo.UUCP
Wed Apr 23 06:43:41 AEST 1986


> If restricted to only one flavor [of bytes], I would choose signed any day. 
> It it easier on a PDP-11 to mask the high byte if unwanted than to
> generate it (sign extend) if needed.

But one ends up doing the masking a lot more often.  I believe Dennis has
said that he now regrets the concession to the hardware of making char
signed in the original C implementation.
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