Path: csiph.com!news.swapon.de!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: How could have I factored this better?
Date: Sat, 21 May 2016 20:59:23 -0700
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 15
Message-ID: <871t4ud9pg.fsf@jester.gateway.pace.com>
References: <5e60dbda-f34b-4be0-bfac-d32ddc67062f@googlegroups.com> <d3c4045d-0df1-42d8-8cf8-5649078bfbea@googlegroups.com> <nhr7nc$1vtk$1@gioia.aioe.org>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="52eac348160ce62b68e4635eee7cc854"; logging-data="15091"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19SMVeC6WnkWt2NUJy4A2+2"
User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux)
Cancel-Lock: sha1:OwFCjII6nDgOa7yK3vqwAUeiKy8= sha1:Q+jYwO+7TzsGBr82VFoz8r3k7wE=
Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:47420

Darin Murphy <murphy.darin@gmail.com> writes:
> Thanks Humptydumpty for your example and for explaining how to use
>  "u" in documentation for letting other programmers or myself
>  latter realize that it's asking for only positive integers.

It implies a little extra too: namely that the number is treated as
unsigned in the code.  That is, a bit pattern like $FFFFFFFF would be
interpreted as the largest positive number (around 4 billion) rather
than as the signed integer -1.  In this case though, such large numbers
probably aren't relevant.

Note that unsigned's range includes 0, which is generally not considered
to be a positive number.  If we want to indicate that a number comes
from the set {0,1,2,3...}, we generally say that the number is
non-negative.