[OT] Walter about compilers

[Era Scarecrow]

On Tuesday, 22 January 2013 at 15:11:41 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Era Scarecrow:
>
>> Are you going to check after every little + that you didn't 
>> have an overflow?
>
> In debug mode that's the job of a modern well designed 
> language, just like checking an index is inside the bounds of 
> an array every time you perform an array access.

  Agreed. However D (compilers) doesn't have an option to check 
those, I think it was requested but walter said no (due to slower 
speed I think); Therefore if the compiler won't do it for you, 
you have to do it yourself. I really wouldn't want to have to use 
BigInt for everything that can't overflow and then check to make 
sure I can fit it in my smaller variables afterwards along with 
the extra move. I wouldn't want to use BigInts everywhere, and 
long's aren't needed everywhere either.

  Of course if an attribute was added that checked just those 
functions for important overflows then it could help, but in 
truth it kinda clutters the signatures with something that isn't 
an important attribute. Guess 'CheckedInt' could work in those 
cases, but that's more during runtime and release rather than 
debugging.