<i>In this case, our conventional languages provide no way for a programmer to say &quot;I care about overflow&quot;.</i><p><i>What if we instead said, &quot;compilers will never ever consider overflow&quot; and let those who care about overflow fend for themselves in the source language?</i><p>Does specifying an an unsigned type like size_t (as the author suggests in the last paragraph) achieve most of this?   It&#x27;s slightly backward, in that it&#x27;s telling the compiler that overflow is not explicitly prohibited, but I think it usually has the same effect of preventing optimizations based on the assumption that signed overflow is not allowed.