[ragnese]

Yeah, I don't have any real intuition about the performance cost, either. But real-world Haskell problems do fine, as you said. And Haskell has fast-math libraries that, presumably, give you the fast-but-risky C arithmetic.

I also agree that a "more realistic" option is to just throw on overflow by default, the same way we throw on divide-by-zero.

But that won't happen either. :/