The worst thing is that people take it as acceptable that this loop is going to operate differently upon overflow (e.g. assume N is TYPE_MAX) depending on whether i or N are signed vs. unsigned.
Is this a real concern, beyond 'experts panel' esoteric discussion? Do folks really put a number into an int, that is sometimes going to need to be exactly TYPE_MAX but no larger?
I've gone a lifetime programming, and this kind of stuff never, ever matters one iota.
Yes, people really do care about overflow. Because it gets used in security checks, and if they don't understand the behavior then their security checks don't do what they expected.
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30475 shows someone going hyperbolic over the issue. The technical arguments favor the GCC maintainers. However I prefer the position of the person going hyperbolic.
That example was not 'overflow'. It was 'off by one'? That seems uninteresting, outside as you say the security issue where somebody might take advantage of it.
The very few times I've ever put in a check like that, I always do something like i < MAX_INT - 5 just to be sure, because I'm never confident that I intuitively understand off-by-one errors.
Same here. But I instead run a loop over a range around MAX_INT (or wherever the issue is) and print the result, so I know I'm doing what I think I'm doing. Exhaustive testing is quick, with a computer!
