Do I need to explicitly handle negative numbers or zero when summing squared digits?

Question

I recently had a test in my class. One of the problems was the following:

Given a number n, write a function in C/C++ that returns the su

Answer 1

I don't completely like either your version or your teacher's. Your teacher's version does the extra tests that you correctly point out are unnecessary. C's mod operator is not a proper mathematical mod: a negative number mod 10 will produce a negative result (proper mathematical modulus is always non-negative). But since you're squaring it anyway, no difference.

But this is far from obvious, so I would add to your code not the checks of your teacher, but a big comment that explains why it works. E.g.:

/* NOTE: This works for negative values, because the modulus gets squared */