Integer overflow: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:37, 21 November 2022

Revision as of 23:12, 21 November 2022

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An overflow condition may give results leading to unintended behavior. In particular, if the possibility has not been anticipated, overflow can compromise a program's reliability and [[software security|security]].

For some applications, such as timers and clocks, wrapping on overflow can be desirable. The [[CC11 (programmingC standard languagerevision)#C11|C11]] standard]] states that for unsigned integers, modulo wrapping is the defined behavior and the term overflow never applies: "a computation involving unsigned operands can never overflow."<ref name="auto">{{cite web |url=https://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=ISO/IEC+9899:2011 |title=ISO/IEC 9899:2011 Information technology - Programming languages - C |author=ISO staff |website=ANSI.org}}</ref>

On some processors like [[graphics processing unit]]s (GPUs) and [[digital signal processor]]s (DSPs) which support [[saturation arithmetic]], overflowed results would be "clamped", i.e. set to the minimum or the maximum value in the representable range, rather than wrapped around.