Although Go provides unsigned numbers and arithmetic, we tend to use the signed int form even for quantities that can’t be negative, such as the length of an array, though uint might seem a more obvious choice. Indeed, the built-in len function returns a signed int, as in this loop which announces prize medals in reverse order:
medals := []string{“gold”, “silver”, “bronze”}
for i := len(medals) – 1; i >= 0; i– {
fmt.Println(medals[i]) // “bronze”, “silver”, “gold”
}
The alternative would be calamitous. If len returned an unsigned number, then i too would be a uint, and the condition i >= 0 would always be true by definition. After the third iteration, in which i == 0, the i– statement would cause i to become not −1, but the maximum uint value, and the evaluation of medals[i] would fail at run time, or panic, by attempting to access an element outside the bounds of the slice.
For this reason, unsigned numbers tend to be used only when their bitwise operators or peculiar arithmetic operators are required, as when implementing bit sets, parsing binary file formats, or for hashing and cryptography. They are typically not used for merely non-negative quantities.