Understanding integers
Integers help in storing numbers in contracts. Solidity provides the following two types of integer:
- Signed integers: Signed integers can hold both negative and positive values.
- Unsigned integers: Unsigned integers can hold positive values along with zero. They can also hold negative values apart from positive and zero.
There are multiple flavors of integers in Solidity for each of these types. Solidity provides the uint8 type to represent an 8-bit unsigned integer and thereon in multiples of 8 till it reaches 256. In short, there can be 32 different declarations of uint with different multiples of 8, such as uint8, uint16, and unit24, as far as the uint256 bit. Similarly, there are equivalent data types for integers, such as int8 and int16, up to int256.
Depending on requirements, an appropriately sized integer should be chosen – for example, when storing values between 0 and 255, uint8 is appropriate, and when storing values between...
