If you're thinking about how in e.g. python, integer addition never overflows and is always a big integer, then yes. If "small"/machine integers and big integer

If you're thinking about how in e.g. python, integer addition never overflows and is always a big integer, then yes. If "small"/machine integers and big integers are seperated each have a distinct type, promotion on overflow would introduce a type instability on every addition (not only the overflowing one!). This is precisely because the type would depend on the result of the addition, not only the input types (which may both be machine integer types). A "solution" to this conundrum is to have big integers by default, which sadly isn't feasible for performance reasons - you can't then take advantage of hardware, because every operation necessarily has to do more work than would be required for machine integers. -- To add on to this, when encountering overflow (which doesn't happen often in the first place), it's usually sufficient to go for 128 bit integers first instead of jumping directly to big integers. They're still quite a bit faster and offer a much larger space to work with.