Catching integer overflow

[Nick Keighley]

I don't know. Integer overflow doesn't seem serious enough to warrant
hardware support. [...]

You'd rather have wrong answers quickly?

Yes. Integer operations need to be fast. Overflow checking should be
optional, perhaps during development only.

But if there is a hardware trap (like divide by zero) that didn't slow
things down, then that's fine, provided the overflow was a genuine error. I
can see that being difficult to implement however, unless you also have
separate arithmetic instructions for signed and unsigned values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501