[gustedt]

Besides C not having exceptions (that you could catch), the point was and is to have a way such that such a call has defined behaviour under any circumstances. The return value of the functions can even be ignored if the wrap around of the overflowing value is what your code expects.

So it is on the programmer to define what happens on error, they could ignore, try to back off by computing the high value bits, `exit` or `abort`.