Do you know the difference between Do you know the difference between signed and unsigned integers?

An unsigned integer is an integer that can only be positive. This is because it isn't represented with any sign in front of the number. Therefore, it can't have a minus sign in front of the number (hence, unsigned).

A signed integer is an integer that can be either positive or negative. That's because it can have a sign to represent whether the number is positive or negative.

For example, let's say you have an 8-bit integer. Computers use binary so you can only represent a binary number within those 8 bits as either 1 or 0. An 8-bit integer essentially only has 8 spots to place either a 1 or 0. Therefore, that means it can only have 256 unique combinations to be represented for decimal numbers. If it is unsigned, you can allocate all those combinations to be just a positive decimal number so you can have a number between 0 and 255 (including said numbers as well). If the integer is signed, you would have to allocate a portion of those 256 combinations to representing a negative decimal number. Therefore, the range becomes -128 to 127.

Depending on what application you're using the value for, you might want to get the highest possible value or have the ability to use negative numbers.