Unsigned Primitives

Why doesn't Java have unsigned primitives? I can never wrap my head around this. How hard would it be to implement unsigned arithmetic? Every single other strongly typed language out there has them!

I love Java, but this always bothered me. Java does not exist in a vacuum. Sure, when you are working in pure java environment, with pure java standards, and data formats you are fine. But in the real word, sometimes data uses non-java friendly conventions. Especially in imaging. Most images use unsigned ints or bytes to store pixels. Sure, you can always use an int to store a byte but this is wasteful.

Furthermore, most of Java API's work with signed data. If you are just crunching numbers, this is usually not a big problem - but if you try to do something more fancy you run into issues. For example - awt package has some nice image display capabilities. I do not feel like implementing a rendering algorithm for my data. I also do not want to use JAI, because it is not standard, not mature enough. I want to use the existing API - but I can't really plug a wraparound primitive into it. While byte in an int works fine (if you tweak the color model to only use 8 low order bits) an unsigned int might be a problem. There are no API's which work with long types, so int cannot be wrapped into a higher order primitive this way.

So, I might need to check for these things and normalize the data somehow. Now, the big question is - should a negative int be converted to the min or the max value? I guess it is relative...

Seriously though - is there a reason for leaving out unsigned primitives? Any reason at all? Or was this done on a whim?

I still like java, I'm just slightly irritated :P

Tags: java, java programming, programming, java data types, java unsigned data types, java primitive data types, java unsigned primitive data types, java primitives, java unsigned primitives, unsigned, unsigned data types, unsigned primitive data types, unsigned primitives, primitives, data, imaging, java imaging, JAI