Amhtsa.156 net.bugs.v7 utzoo!decvax!harpo!ihnss!mhtsa!rick Wed May 5 02:12:29 1982 Re: overflow in C revisited "The action taken on overflow or underflow depends on the machine at hand." (Kernighan+Ritchie, "The C Programming Language", Prentice-Hall, 1978, p.38) "The handling of overflow and divide check in expression evaluation is machine-dependent." (ibid. p.185) Although you may claim that invoking machine dependence is inexact in a language specification, you cannot claim that the C specification "ignores" overflow.