About
overflow is instruction exception that is triggered by the ALU via a status flag when the arithmetic operation does not have enough space to be performed.
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Example
If a programmer incorrectly:
- declares a variable as int (16 bit integer) that has a maximum storage value of <math>2^{15}−1</math>
- try to store a bigger value in this variable, the cpu will fail with an overflow failure.
That variable should have been declared with a bigger data type such as long, which has at least 32 bits on any computer.