Why do Delphi and Free Pascal usually prefer a signed-integer data type to unsigned one?

Question

I\'m not a Pascal newbie, but I still don\'t know until now why Delphi and Free Pascal usually declares parameters and returned values as signed integers whereas I see them

Answer 1

• Some string related search functions return -1 when nothing is found.
• I believe the reasoning behind this is that MaxInt is 2GB which is the maximum size for strings in 32 bit Delphi. This because a single process can have up to 2GB memory