Why does stdlib.h's abs() family of functions return a signed value?

Question

The negative implication of this is noted in the man page:

NOTES Trying to take the absolute value of the most negative integer is not defined.

What's the reasoning behind this and what's the best recourse for a person who would like to avoid undefined behavior? Do I have to resort to something like:

unsigned uabs(signed val) {
    return val > 0
        ? val
        : (val == 1U << ((sizeof(val) * 8) - 1))
            ? -1U
            : -val;
}

(Intentionally hacky to emphasize displeasure with stdlib ;-)

Example

Say you had a 4-bit signed value (for ease of understanding). unsigned max is 15, signed (positive) max is 7, signed (negative) min is -8, so abs(-8) won't fit into a signed value. Sure, you can represent it as -8, but then division and multiplication with the result don't work as expected.

Answer 1

Why would it ever return a value using the unsigned space?

Let's consider 8 bit signed and unsigned numbers. If you have -128, the result is undefined... I guess stdlib doesn't want to slow things down that much. If you think you might have a number in that range, then you need to use something else.

If you think you might have a value greater than 127 in your signed char, then you are mistaken.

Ergo, it is unnecessary for the value to be able to hold a value greater than 127, and keeping it signed loses nothing. If you want to cast it to unsigned, go ahead. Since it just used to be a signed integer, the odds are good that you will be doing signed math again. Personally, I think I'd prefer that the type stay signed, since it is pretty rare that I actually want to be dealing with unsigned and I'm not doing bit operations.

But maybe someone else can dig up some notes from the standards committee.

Answer 2

The real answer to this question lies in the type promotion rules.

If I apply an arithmetic operator to an unsigned int and an int, then the int argument is promoted to unsigned, and the result is also unsigned.

If the abs() function returned unsigned, then it would cause this kind of type promotion of other values when it was used in an expression, which would cause unexpected results. For example, this code:

if (abs(-1) * -1 < 0)
    printf("< 0\n");
else
    printf(">= 0\n");

Would print ">= 0", which many wouldn't like. The tradeoff, of not being able to use the single value INT_MIN, presumably seemed OK.