It's worth noting that ssize_t is a POSIX type, and is only guaranteed to have t...

vardump · on Sept 18, 2016

Thanks for the correction!

> only guaranteed to have the range [-1, SSIZE_MAX]

Oh, that's a weird type. I wonder if any compiler implementation encodes it with -1 bias, so that all bits 0 means "-1".

It could cause a disaster if/when ssize_t is encoded as anything else but standard twos complement signed number...

colejohnson66 · on Sept 18, 2016

I'd assume it's just an unsigned number with 0xFF... representing -1. So counting would go (assuming 8 bits)

    0xFC SSIZE_MAX - 2
    0xFD SSIZE_MAX - 1
    0xFE SIZE_MAX
    0xFF -1

That makes more sense to me than a bias that the compiler would have to know about.