On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:18 AM, "V. Armando Solé" <sole@esrf.fr> wrote:
From a pure user perspective, I would not expect the abs function to return a negative number. Returning +127 plus a warning the first time that happens seems to me a good compromise.
I guess the question is what's the common context to use small integers in the first place. If it is to save memory, then upcasting may not be the best solution. I may be wrong, but if you decide to use those types in the first place, you need to know about overflows. Abs is just one of them (dividing by -1 is another, although this one actually raises an exception). Detecting it may be costly, but this would need benchmarking. That being said, without context, I don't find 127 a better solution than -128. cheers, David