on the use of char

[Frans Englich]

On Thursday 29 July 2004 02:04, George Staikos wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
>    I'd like to point out that we need to be careful about the use of "char"
> for storing numbers in KDE.  Some platforms have unsigned char type, others
> have signed char type.  I happen to have both.  Consequently I have seen,
> on a regular basis, broken KDE applications on one or both of my machines
> due to code that assumes signedness or unsignedness of char.  Yes, I have
> also implemented this bug before.
>
>    So if your goal is to store a relatively small number and not waste
> space, can I recommend either using a bitfield int, or thinking again "is
> it really worth the possible bugs in order to save 3 bytes out of, ex.,
> ~5MB"?
>
>   (really, explicitly specifying the signedness may only help half of the
> cases I've seen.  don't go there...)

This is perhaps something for the Common Mistakes Doc:

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/mistakes.html


			Frans