On 30 March 2010 10:23, Chad Nelson <chad.thecomfychair@gmail.com> wrote:
If that was aimed at XInt, note its purpose: it's intended to allow calculation with numbers of arbitrary length, up to the memory size of the system. If the system can't provide enough memory for it at some point, that *is* an overflow -- the number is too large to represent.
That definition is already used in Boost as well, in the Boost.Math library: "Overflow Error: Occurs when the result is either infinite, or too large to represent in the numeric type being returned by the function."
I disagree. Consider, for instance, [lib.basic.string]/4a in C++03: For any string operation, if as a result of the operation, size() would exceed max_size() then the operation throws length_error. That, in my opinion, is the equivalent of an overflow. The type is fundamentally *incapable* of representing such a large string/number. Note that it's a distinct exception from bad_alloc, which states that the type *could* represent the value requested, if only the memory allocator would give it what it asked for.