[jonathrg]

Integer wrapping on overflow is not just a C thing, it happens at the hardware level as part of ALU instructions. It's actually kind of difficult to come up with a different behaviour that makes sense. Saturating arithmetic requires additional transistors.

[int_19h]

It happens on hardware level for a single opcode, sure, but a 1:1 mapping between such an opcode and arithmetic operators in a high-level PL isn't a given, especially in presence of advanced optimizations.

In any case, PLs don't have to blindly follow what the hardware does as the default. Many early PLs did checked arithmetic by default. Conversely, many instruction sets from that era have specific opcodes to facilitate overflow checking.

The reason why we got it in C specifically is because of its "high-level PDP assembly" origins.