CONTEXT: reverse engineering MIPS disassembly from late 90s, equal parts the fault of programmer and compiler.

programmer: "i'm gonna use unsigned chars here because they're just one byte big and less bytes is a faster program"
compiler: "oh fuck i have to add instructions to emulate overflows"

programmer: "i'm gonna copy this unsigned char into a char, then, oh yeah, shift a number by it"
compiler: "oh fuck i have to handle negative shifts"

programmer: "int length = 1; int i = 0; do {stuff} while (++i < length);" (part of an inlined C macro)
compiler: "today's my day off, leave the branch in"