[gwillen]

x86 at one time had a single-byte instruction that would trap if the overflow bit was set, INTO. It doesn't exist in 64-bit mode, I believe, and it was never widely used as far as I know. The performance implications of adding even a single additional instruction to every integer operation were probably still prohibitive? (And there's a history in x86 of specialized clever instructions and mechanisms going unused, due to being slower than doing the same thing some other way.)