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Positive / Negative values (Score:3, Insightful)

by ziggy (25) on 2003.03.16 11:00 (#17969) Journal

Have you ever seen this sort of thing in an API where a positive value in a parameter means one thing and negative value means something very different?
I'm pretty sure I have, but I don't remember where. It may have been another MSAPI, which would confirm this example as an instance of MSThinking 1.0.
This seems like the kind of trickery a newbie C hacker would use in the days when they're being too clever by half. Especially something that would have been common in the early 1990s when C was starting to catch on big time in the microcomputing world.
Thankfully, those days don't last very long (or there would be all sorts of other trickery hanging on the boolean nature of the sign bit.) Unfortunately, sometimes those tricks make it into public APIs.

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