Comment by skeezyboy
1 day ago
> Define boundary conditions -- how much precision do you need?
imagine if integer arithmetic gave wrong answers in certain conditions lol why did we choose the current compromise?
1 day ago
> Define boundary conditions -- how much precision do you need?
imagine if integer arithmetic gave wrong answers in certain conditions lol why did we choose the current compromise?
In my experience, most code that operates on integers does not anticipate overflow or wraparound. So it is almost always guaranteed to produce wrong results when these conditions occur, and is only saved by the fact that usually they doesn't occur in practice.
It is odd to me that every major CPU instruction set has ALU codes to indicate when these conditions have occurred, and yet many programming languages ignore them entirely or make it hard to access them. Rust at least has the quartet of saturating, wrapping, checked, and unchecked arithmetic operations.
They're not "wrong" -- the error bars are well-defined.
Signed Integer Overflow OTOH is Undefined Behavior, so it's worse.