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While there are many things I like about the Java language, the lack of unsigned types has always bothered me. According to Gosling, they were too complicated: Quiz any C developer about unsigned, and pretty soon you discover that almost no C developers actually understand what goes on with unsigned, what unsigned arithmetic is. Things like that made C complex. Ironically this kind of hand-holding tends to introduce other complexities that are often more difficult to deal with than the original solution. In this particular case, leaving out unsigned types doesn't stop the need to work with unsigned data. Instead, it forces the developer to work around the language limitation in various unusual ways.