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Comment by d_tr | Hacker News Reader

Whatever as long as the name does not imply that these are integers, because then it is just wrong. The same holds for overflowing results being clamped or resulting in smaller or negative values due to wraparound. These are not integers.

There is only one correct behavior for something named "int". Give the correct result or throw an error.

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Agree `int` is the problem. This implies we're doing math over all integers, when in most languages what we're actually working with are bounded integers. (There's some counter-examples, Python and Haskell come to mind.) Calling them sane names like `i32` and `i64` makes it clear that overflow exists.

Those are all integers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_arithmetic - "The modern approach to modular arithmetic was developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss in his book Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, published in 1801." They have been integers for over 200 years now.

Wrapping around is correct integer behavior; clamping ("5 + 1 = 5") isn't. Clamping implies immediately that all positive numbers are equal to zero.

True correct behavior would have that if a > b, then a + c > b + c also holds true for all integers, but that isn't guaranteed for wrapping (or clamping.) (e.g. if 250 > 1, then 250 + 10 > 1 + 10 should be true, but with 8-bit wrapping you would get 4 > 11, which is false.)

But if you write a + b and the result is wrapped around or saturated, it's not integer addition. It's something else and should be written in another way in code and have a different name. I am aware of modular arithmetic.

If you have a type named "int" with an operation called "addition", and that operation is not actually integer addition... it's wrong.

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