It's a valid mathematical notation, sure. But there is an implicit understanding that the - in this case is making a number negative rather than subtracting (or, an implicit subtraction from 0).

With the way negative numbers generally work in binary there would be much different ones and zeroes stored behind the scenes, so handling that would have to be pretty intentional.

That said, I did just try it in Java because that's what I work in normally and I swear I had a gotcha with that. But it worked fine as far as I can tell.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Find me a language where it doesn't work like that, and we'll continue the discussion.

Unary minus operator is standard in every single language that I used so far, including C/C++, Java, Python, Kotlin, Lua, JS/TS, Groovy, PHP, Visual Basic, Excel, Mathematica, Haskell, Bash.

Here's more info btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_operation