[LLVMdev] Reference Manual Clarifications 2

[Joachim Durchholz]

Am Samstag, den 19.04.2008, 16:24 -0700 schrieb Jon Sargeant:
> First, I can assign -1 to 
> the count to indicate an invalid or unknown value.

This is a C-ism. In a language that supports discriminated unions well,
you'd do something like
  type AllocaCount = Invalid | Unknown | Known int
(where Invalid, Unknown and Known are the constants that do the
distinction between union variants).

> Second, if I attempt 
> to allocate a negative count, I can print an assertion failure and abort 
> the program.  Had I interpreted the count as an unsigned value, the 
> program would attempt to allocate anywhere from 2 gigabytes to 4 
> gigabytes.

Which might be exactly what it's supposed to do. Suppose you're writing
heap management code.

> I'm not necessarily saying that NumElements should be 
> signed, only that the choice between signed and unsigned is not obvious.

Obviously, obviousness is in the eye of the beholder :-)
(SCNR)

Regards,
Jo