Question

How does one specify the maximum value representable for an unsigned integer type?

I would like to know how to initialize min in the loop below that iteratively computes min and max lengths from some structs.

var minLen uint = ???
var maxLen uint = 0
for _, thing := range sliceOfThings {
  if minLen > thing.n { minLen = thing.n }
  if maxLen < thing.n { maxLen = thing.n }
}
if minLen > maxLen {
  // If there are no values, clamp min at 0 so that min <= max.
  minLen = 0
}

so that the first time through the comparison, minLen >= n.

Answer 1

https://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/msg/71c307e4d73024ce?pli=1

The germane part:

Since integer types use two’s complement arithmetic, you can infer the
min/max constant values for int and uint. For example,

const MaxUint = ^uint(0) 
const MinUint = 0 
const MaxInt = int(MaxUint >> 1) 
const MinInt = -MaxInt - 1

As per @CarelZA’s comment:

uint8  : 0 to 255 
uint16 : 0 to 65535 
uint32 : 0 to 4294967295 
uint64 : 0 to 18446744073709551615 
int8   : -128 to 127 
int16  : -32768 to 32767 
int32  : -2147483648 to 2147483647 
int64  : -9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807