From: Bob Stout 

On 19 Jan 2004 Roy.J..Tellason!1.270.615.0{at}filegate.net wrote:

> I just wish that some folks would _do_ that when they write stuff,
> instead of it being the default for whatever the case may be.  Like
> using a "long" to represent the quantity of free space on a
hard drive.
> That number is _never_ going to go negative, so "unsigned"
should be in
> there too, but enough programmers left it out (laziness? some other
> reason?) that >2G drives break an awful lot of software.  Or did,
> anyhow, under dos for one example.

This was done for the same reason as character operations return an int. A
return value of -1 was useful for returning error conditions. You can't
return an unsigned long of -1. Nowadays, the safest practice would be to
use an unsigned long long.

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