INTMIN

INTMIN is a conventional name used in many programming languages to denote the minimum value that can be represented by a signed integer type. It is often exposed as a constant or macro, such as INT_MIN in C and C++, and is used in bounds checking, initialization, and algorithms that require a known lower bound.

In C and related languages, INT_MIN is defined in limits.h as the negation of INT_MAX minus one. In two's complement systems, which are common today, this value is exactly -2^(N-1), where N is the number of bits in the signed int type. For example, on a typical 32-bit system, INT_MIN is -2147483648, and on a 16-bit system it would be -32768. The exact value depends on the width of int on the target platform, and portable code should rely on the provided constant rather than hard-coding a numeric literal.

Usage considerations include initialization to the smallest possible value, comparison benchmarks, and detecting underflow in arithmetic operations. A common caveat is that taking the absolute value of INT_MIN can overflow in languages where the absolute value function operates within the same signed type (for example, abs(INT_MIN) may be undefined or overflow).

Beyond C, many languages provide analogous constants for their integer types (for example, Integer.MIN_VALUE in Java). In languages with arbitrary-precision integers, such as Python, there is no fixed INT_MIN, since integers do not have a predefined lower bound.

See also: INT_MAX, UINT_MAX, LLONG_MIN, LONG_MIN.