> but there are plenty of times where silent overflow is correct and desirable behavior When or where? I would say it's always a bug in a program—except when

> but there are plenty of times where silent overflow is correct and desirable behavior When or where? I would say it's always a bug in a program—except when (mis)using ints as bit-fields in very special circumstances. Simply, as more or less every computation in the real world is build around the concept of whole numbers, and not around the idea of overflowing two-complement bit-fields. The later is so exotic that there is afik almost no proper use for it (the only exception being as a very low level building block to enable computers do actually useful calculations).