title: Is Java's lack of unsigned primitive types a characteristic of Java the platform or Java the language?
body: <p>There are questions about <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/430346/why-doesnt-java-support-unsigned-ints">why Java doesn't support unsigned types</a> and a few questions about dealing with unsigned types. I did some searching, and it appears that Scala also doesn't support unsigned data types. Is the limition in the language design of Java and Scala, in the generated bytecode, or is it in the JVM itself? Could there be some language that runs on the JVM and is otherwise identical to Java (or Scala), yet supports unsigned primitive data types?</p>