[Python-Dev] Memory size overflows

[Tim Peters]

[Greg Ewing]
> The really tragic thing about all this is that most
> machines have perfectly good facilities for detecting
> overflow at the machine level, but no commonly used
> HLL that I know of provides access to them, for some
> unfathomable reason.

Well, that's where it bifurcates Yet Again -- Pentiums have a perfectly
usable "give me the high bits of a 32x32->64 bit product" instruction, and
it's just a couple lines of inline assembler under MSVC or gcc (both make
such stuff easy to get at, embedded in C code).

But as I said at the start, I ignore these things until they pop up in real
life.  So few *have* popped in real life that there hasn't been any point to
creating mounds of platform-dependent #ifdef'ed infrastructure.