[flatfinger]

I can't really blame gcc for that one, since the most straightforward way of using signed integer arithmetic would yield a negative value if the result is bigger than INT_MAX, but it would be very weird that programs would expect and rely upon that behavior.

On the other hand, even the function "unsigned mul_mod_65536(unsigned short x, unsigned short y) { return (x * y) & 0xFFFF; }" which the authors of the Standard would have expected commonplace implementations to process in consistent fashion for all possible values of "x" and "y" [the Rationale describes their expectations] will sometimes cause gcc to jump the rails if the arithmetical value of the product exceeds INT_MAX, despite the fact that the sign bit of the computation is ignored. If, for example, the product would exceed INT_MAX on the second iteration of a loop that should run a variable number of iterations, gcc will replace the loop for code that just handles the first iteration.