Are signed hexdecimal literals possible?

Question

I have an array of bitmasks, the idea being to use them to clear a specified number of the least significant bits of an integer that is being used as a set of flags. It is defined as follows:

int clearLow[10]=
{
0xffffffff, 0xfffffffe, 0xfffffffc, 0xfffffff8, 0xfffffff0, 0xffffffe0, 0xffffffc0, 0xffffff80, 0xffffff00, 0xfffffe00
};

I recently switching to using gcc 4.8 I have found that this array starts throwing warnings,

warning: narrowing conversion of ‘4294967295u’ from ‘unsigned int’ to ‘int’ inside { } is ill-formed in C++11
etc
etc

Clearly my hexadecimal literals are being taken as unsigned ints and the fix is easy as, honestly, I do not care if this array is int or unsigned int it just needs to have the appropriate bits set in each cell, but my question is this:

Are there any ways to set literals in hexadecimal, for the purposes of simply setting bits, without the compiler assuming them to be unsigned?

Answer 1

It looks like you just want an array of unsigned int to use for your bit masking:

const unsigned clearLow[] = {
    0xffffffff, 0xfffffffe, 0xfffffffc, 0xfffffff8, 0xfffffff0, 0xffffffe0, 0xffffffc0, 0xffffff80, 0xffffff00, 0xfffffe00
};

Answer 2

You describe that you just want to use the values as operands to bit operations. As that is the case, just always use unsigned datatypes. That's the simple solution.