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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T16:39:51+00:00

This is a rather silly question but why is int commonly used instead of

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This is a rather silly question but why is int commonly used instead of unsigned int when defining a for loop for an array in C or C++?

for(int i;i<arraySize;i++){}
for(unsigned int i;i<arraySize;i++){}

I recognize the benefits of using int when doing something other than array indexing and the benefits of an iterator when using C++ containers. Is it just because it does not matter when looping through an array? Or should I avoid it all together and use a different type such as size_t?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is a more general phenomenon, often people don’t use the correct types for their integers. Modern C has semantic typedefs that are much preferable over the primitive integer types. E.g everything that is a “size” should just be typed as size_t. If you use the semantic types systematically for your application variables, loop variables come much easier with these types, too.

    And I have seen several bugs that where difficult to detect that came from using int or so. Code that all of a sudden crashed on large matrixes and stuff like that. Just coding correctly with correct types avoids that.

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