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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: endian history
Date: Sat, 03 Oct 2026 04:44:30 -0700
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aph@littlepinkcloud.invalid writes:

> Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> wrote:
>
>> aph@littlepinkcloud.invalid writes:
>>
>>> Lawrence D?Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Now, can anybody solve the mystery of why the Java language designers
>>>> thought it would be a good idea to leave out unsigned integers?
>>>
>>> It's unnecessary, and the designer(s) wanted to get away from the zoo of
>>> C's integer types.
>>>
>>> With wrapping signed arithmetic, all of the semantics of unsigned
>>> arithmetic is the same, except for right shift and division
>>> operations.
>>
>> Also left shift
>
> It's the same in Java.

So a peculiar signed data type, plus...

>> and relational comparisons.
>
> Not really arithmetic, but they're in the standard library.

Ignoring any operations where the results differ, lets us
say how "signed" behaves is the same as "unsigned".

It seems to me this argument only strengthens the motivation
to have unsigned types.