The semantics most programs need for overflow are to ensure that (1) overflow does not have intolerable side effects beyond yielding a likely-meaningless value,

The semantics most programs need for overflow are to ensure that (1) overflow does not have intolerable side effects beyond yielding a likely-meaningless value, and (2) some programs may need to know whether an overflow might have produced an observably-arithmetically-incorrect result. A smart compiler for a well-designed language should in many cases be able to meet these requirements much more efficiently than it could rigidly process the aforementioned intrinsics. A couple of easy optimizations, for example, that would be available to a smart compiler processing straightforwardly-written code to use automatic overflow checking, but not to one fed code that uses intrinsics: 1. If code computes x=yz, but then never uses the value of x, a compiler that notices that x is unused could infer that the computation could never be observed to produce an arithmetically-incorrect result, and thus there would be no need to check for overflow. 2. If code computes xy/z, and a compiler knows that y=z*2, the compiler could simplify the calculation to x+x, and would thus merely have to check for overflow in that addition. If code used intrinsics, the compiler would have to overflow check the multiplication, which on most platforms would be more expensive. If an implementation uses wrapping semantics, the cost would be even worse, since an implementation would have to perform an actual division to ensure "correct" behavior in the overflow case. Having a language offer options for the aforementioned style of loose overflow checking would open up many avenues of optimization which would be unavailable in language that only over precise overflow checking or no overflow checking whatsoever.