Board Thread:New Features/@comment-35329880-20200903074342/@comment-45117243-20200911080409

Andrewds1021 wrote: Okay. Based on your reply, I think you might have missed the point I was trying to make. Let me try again.

Given an n-bit int, you can do one of two things. If you use it as a signed int and literally assign -1 the meaning of "no limit", then the max explicit limit you can set is 2^(n-1)-1 and all of the negative integers less than -1 are useless. Alternatively, you can use it as an unsigned int. In that case, you could reserve the max value (i.e. -1 for a signed int) to represent "no limit" and then you are left with the max explicit limit settable to 2^n-2. In other words, using an unsigned int would nearly double the max value you can set as an explicit limit compared to using a signed int of the same size.

As such, I am assuming that whomever wrote the code for Discussions is using an unsigned int. That is what I am assuming. Given that, why would someone have reported the max as -1? My guess would be they found the number written in hexadecimal and used some sort of conversion tool (that assumes signed ints) to get the decimal representation; returning -1.

That is my assumption. I am not making any claims about how likely that assumption is to be correct. All I am doing is trying to clarify the assumption that lead me to say. What I meant is, the limit set in the software code may be not any particular number, but "the largest number available with whatever amount of bits we are currently using". One way to represent this value is to take the value -1 and then treat it as an unsigned integer. This may be just intuitive to someone experienced in computer-science. (not that I am one)

Well, it's all just a guess about an unconfirmed rumor.