Bjarne agrees.

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2019/p14...

There is a really convincing set of arguments against this idea by Robert Seacord[1]. I used to be in the signed size camp, but I've come around to preferring unsigned as much as possible because it's much easier to reason about. I think there are far more footguns than people realize when it comes to signed integers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82jVpEmAEV4

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norir 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In my reading, what Stroustroup is saying is that given other problems in c/c++, that singed sizes are less bad than unsigned but both have clear and significant deficiencies. A new language doesn't have to inherit all of these deficiencies.

	▲	ok123456 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No. He says that signed/unsigned arithmetic is a universal problem. And in the context of std::span, using signed arithmetic is the correct choice rather than shoehorning in size_t to make it more cosmetically consistent with the rest of the STL.