[adrian_b]

This is a modern phenomenon.

In the first few decades of electronic computers and programming languages, having an addition or any other arithmetic operation that would not signal correctly the overflow exceptions would have been considered as completely unacceptable.

Computers without the right hardware implementation appeared initially among the so-called minicomputers and microcomputers, i.e. the cheapest computers, which initially were intended for things like industrial control or peripherals for larger computers, where it was supposed that competent programmers will take care to use appropriate workarounds for the hardware limitations.

Unfortunately, this kind of implementation of the arithmetic operations, without appropriate means for detecting overflows, intended initially only for the cheapest products, has spread over the years to all CPUs.

Even if from time to time there are news about some horror story caused by a combination of weak hardware with the lack of appropriate software checks, it appears that there is no hope that this unfortunate hardware design fashion will ever be reversed.

[mark-r]

The processors I've used all have an overflow flag that will tell you if an addition result exceeded the size of the register. But I'm not aware of any compilers that will use the flag, because it adds overhead that isn't wanted or needed 99.99% of the time.