Board Thread:New Features/@comment-35329880-20200903074342/@comment-9605025-20200911074830

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.