I&#x27;d expect anyone experienced with C would say that making such casual, deliberate use of the underflow for such a trivial purpose is pretty foolish, the mark of a developer too clever for his own good. I thought the author was perhaps suggesting this with sarcasm: &quot;Wizened sourcerers&quot; and &quot;full clever.&quot; But maybe not.<p>C&#x27;s variable promotion system is invisible and silent and in my experience a frequent source of bugs in exactly this case (tests in for loops), which is why there&#x27;s enough meat here for a blog post. It&#x27;s usually easy to avoid the promotion issue by using the same type for the loop variable and its test condition. In cases like this, sometimes it&#x27;s better to just use a straightforward and obvious while() loop instead of a correct but tortured for() loop. That makes the relationship between the loop variable updates and the loop body controllable and explicit.