Why does .NET use int instead of uint in certain classes?

Question

I always come across code that uses int for things like .Count, etc, even in the framework classes, instead of uint.

What's the reason for this?

Answer 1

int should be used generally for positions and offsets, since they often/conceptually can be negative.

uint should be used for sizes... but then the language makes it hard to do math with positions and sizes. You really want to be able to write if (pos < size), for example, but if size is uint, then C# will promote them both to long, which is expensive and not what you want. We have to do this stuff all the time, so might as well use int for sizes, too.

Then we have to do math with hash codes and sizes, so they are int too, etc. etc.

The end result is that you should only use uint when you have a really good reason, because it makes it harder to interoperate with everything else that uses int.

Answer 2

If the number is truly unsigned by its intrinsic nature then I would declare it an unsigned int. However, if I just happen to be using a number (for the time being) in the positive range then I would call it an int.

The main reasons being that:

• It avoids having to do a lot of type-casting as most methods/functions are written to take an int and not an unsigned int.
• It eliminates possible truncation warnings.
• You invariably end up wishing you could assign a negative value to the number that you had originally thought would always be positive.

Are just a few quick thoughts that came to mind.

I used to try and be very careful and choose the proper unsigned/signed and I finally realized that it doesn't really result in a positive benefit. It just creates extra work. So why make things hard by mixing and matching.

Answer 3

Unsigned types only behave like whole numbers if the sum or product of a signed and unsigned value will be a signed type large enough to hold either operand, and if the difference between two unsigned values is a signed value large enough to hold any result. Thus, code which makes significant use of UInt32 will frequently need to compute values as Int64. Operations on signed integer types may fail to operate like whole numbers when the operands are overly large, but they'll behave sensibly when operands are small. Operations on unpromoted arguments of unsigned types pose problems even when operands are small. Given UInt32 x; for example, the inequality x-1 < x will fail for x==0 if the result type is UInt32, and the inequality x<=0 || x-1>=0 will fail for large x values if the result type is Int32. Only if the operation is performed on type Int64 can both inequalities be upheld.

While it is sometimes useful to define unsigned-type behavior in ways that differ from whole-number arithmetic, values which represent things like counts should generally use types that will behave like whole numbers--something unsigned types generally don't do unless they're smaller than the basic integer type.

Answer 4

int, in c, is specifically defined to be the default integer type of the processor, and is therefore held to be the fastest for general numeric operations.

Answer 5

UInt32 isn't CLS-Compliant. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.uint32.aspx

I think that over the years people have come to the conclusions that using unsigned types doesn't really offer that much benefit. The better question is what would you gain by making Count a UInt32?

Answer 6

UInt32 is not CLS compliant so it might not be available in all languages that target the Common Language Specification. Int32 is CLS compliant and therefore is guaranteed to exist in all languages.

Answer 7

Some things use int so that they can return -1 as if it were "null" or something like that. Like a ComboBox will return -1 for it's SelectedIndex if it doesn't have any item selected.

Answer 8

Some old libraries and even InStr use negative numbers to mean special cases. I believe either its laziness or there's negative special values.