John Ripley on Nostr: These rules have a practical use in software, in compilers. Knowing for sure that a ...

These rules have a practical use in software, in compilers. Knowing for sure that a number is constrained to be positive, zero, or negative can be used as an optimization: eliminating code altogether, or allowing more efficient operations (in particular if negative is not possible). Computer math being modular (finite word size) makes this applicable in fewer cases though.