Douglas, This is the same discussion I had with Gehard about the negate(). Negating an unsigned with value zero is perfectly legal. When it is not zero, it can throw an exception, as a good numeric class is supposed to do. By the way for the modular integer we don't have this discussion, as the base type unsigned int is actually a modular integer with modulus 2^32, with negation. Regards, Maarten. "Douglas Gregor" <doug.gregor@gmail.com> wrote in message news:325920BA-D24C-475E-AB8C-85D9429C224B@cs.indiana.edu...
On May 26, 2006, at 7:26 AM, Maarten Kronenburg wrote:
Every unsigned integer is an integer,
No.
A (signed) integer will have a negation operator, such that 0 - x = - x, x + -x = 0, etc. An unsigned integer will not have this operator.
and every modular integer is an integer. So therefore in my opinion public inheritance can be used. Also I think there is no other way of defining an unsigned_integer.
Sure there is. What we want is to share nearly all of the implementation details without providing exactly the same interface. You can do that with a common base class (that is neither integer nor unsigned_integer).
Doug _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: