Re: Dumb question about serial's upper limit

"Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com> writes:
> Out of curiosity... why don't we have unsigned ints?

Quick, is 42 an int or an unsigned int?

I think it'd create a slew of new ambiguous cases in the
numeric-datatype hierarchy, for what is really pretty darn small gain.
We're already just barely getting by the problem that 42 might be
intended as an int2 or int8 constant --- and at least those three
datatypes have compatible comparison semantics, so that there aren't any
fundamental semantic problems created if you decide that a constant is
one or the other. Adding unsigned types to the mix seems to me to be
likely to cause some serious issues.

But feel free to give it a try, if you think it's worth a nontrivial
amount of work.

regards, tom lane