Designing function f(f(n)) == -n

Question

A question I got on my last interview:

Design a function f, such that:

f(f(n)) == -n

Where n<

Answer 1

Nobody said it had to be stateless.

int32 f(int32 x) {
    static bool idempotent = false;
    if (!idempotent) {
        idempotent = true;
        return -x;
    } else {
        return x;
    }
}

Cheating, but not as much as a lot of the examples. Even more evil would be to peek up the stack to see if your caller's address is &f, but this is going to be more portable (although not thread safe... the thread-safe version would use TLS). Even more evil:

int32 f (int32 x) {
    static int32 answer = -x;
    return answer;
}

Of course, neither of these works too well for the case of MIN_INT32, but there is precious little you can do about that unless you are allowed to return a wider type.