我能想到一个不幸的副作用。在java嵌入式数据库中，使用32位id字段可以拥有的id数量是2^31，而不是2^32(~ 20亿，而不是~ 40亿)。

I once took a C++ course with someone on the C++ standards committee who implied that Java made the right decision to avoid having unsigned integers because (1) most programs that use unsigned integers can do just as well with signed integers and this is more natural in terms of how people think, and (2) using unsigned integers results in lots easy to create but difficult to debug issues such as integer arithmetic overflow and losing significant bits when converting between signed and unsigned types. If you mistakenly subtract 1 from 0 using signed integers it often more quickly causes your program to crash and makes it easier to find the bug than if it wraps around to 2^32 - 1, and compilers and static analysis tools and runtime checks have to assume you know what you're doing since you chose to use unsigned arithmetic. Also, negative numbers like -1 can often represent something useful, like a field being ignored/defaulted/unset while if you were using unsigned you'd have to reserve a special value like 2^32 - 1 or something similar.

Long ago, when memory was limited and processors did not automatically operate on 64 bits at once, every bit counted a lot more, so having signed vs unsigned bytes or shorts actually mattered a lot more often and was obviously the right design decision. Today just using a signed int is more than sufficient in almost all regular programming cases, and if your program really needs to use values bigger than 2^31 - 1, you often just want a long anyway. Once you're into the territory of using longs, it's even harder to come up with a reason why you really can't get by with 2^63 - 1 positive integers. Whenever we go to 128 bit processors it'll be even less of an issue.

这是对高斯林和其他人的采访，关于简单:

Gosling: For me as a language designer, which I don't really count myself as these days, what "simple" really ended up meaning was could I expect J. Random Developer to hold the spec in his head. That definition says that, for instance, Java isn't -- and in fact a lot of these languages end up with a lot of corner cases, things that nobody really understands. 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. The language part of Java is, I think, pretty simple. The libraries you have to look up.

一旦有符号整型和无符号整型混合在表达式中，事情就开始变得混乱，你可能会丢失信息。将Java限制为有符号int型只能真正解决问题。我很高兴我不必担心整个有符号/无符号的问题，尽管我有时会错过字节中的第8位。

我认为Java本身就很好，添加unsigned会使它变得复杂而没有太多好处。 即使使用简化的整数模型，大多数Java程序员也不知道基本的数字类型是如何行为的——只要阅读《Java Puzzlers》一书，就能了解您可能持有的误解。

至于实用的建议:

如果你的值是任意大小，不适合int，使用long。 如果它们不适合长期使用BigInteger。 只有在需要节省空间时，才对数组使用较小的类型。 如果你正好需要64/32/16/8位，使用long/int/short/byte，不要担心符号位，除法、比较、右移和强制转换除外。

另请参阅关于“将一个随机数生成器从C移植到Java”的回答。

作为处理过无符号算术的人，我可以向您保证，在Java中确实没有必要使用无符号数字。

以C语言为例。让我们这样写:

unsigned int num = -7;
printf("%d", num);

你能猜到上面印的是什么吗?

-7

哇!无符号整数是负的!完全正确。没有真正的正整数。无符号整数只是一个n字节(取决于C语言中的体系结构)的值，它不为符号分配MSB。它不检查分配或读取的数字的实际符号。