It was a deliberate decision to use signed indices. The thought process as I recall was that it was a more compatible choice to use across programming languages. In theory both signed and unsigned indices could be supported, but it becomes a question whether you want to maintain 8 code paths for code that processes dictionary indices.
On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 3:48 PM Daniel Nugent <[email protected]> wrote: > > Can’t find much in the way of reasoning in documentation for this. Closest is > some issues about unsigned ints not being implemented a while back. > > Has this become a deep dependency or is it still just an accident of > implementation? It appears that only the unsigned indices are used. > > -Dan Nugent
