Why is argc an 'int' (rather than an 'unsigned int')?

Question

Why is the command line arguments count variable (traditionally argc) an int instead of an unsigned int? Is there a technical reason for t

Answer 1

Another reason could be that unsigned types can be inconvenient for iteration. For example, this snippet iterating down:

for (size_t i = SIZE - 1; i >= 0; --i)
  ...

Is, in fact, a bug. When i reaches 0 in the last iteration, it will go on right into 4294967295 (on a 32-bit machine) and the loop won't terminate.

For this reason, I personally find plain ints more convenient for iteration. You don't have to be especially careful when you switch a for loop from counting up to counting down when using ints.