From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-01-21 15:03:23
At 10:41 AM 1/21/2004, Peter Dimov wrote:
>Yes, shared_array can be extended that way. But my point was much
simpler:
>you can assert(i >= 0) in operator[](ptrdiff_t i) to catch s[-1], but you
>can't if i is size_t, and s[-1] still works. :-)
IIRC, that was the rationale given by Bjarne and others for the desire to
use of a signed type in similar cases. He was complaining about some
library code that used size_t as an array index, precluding a simple
assert(i >= 0).
--Beman