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For example, an addition may produce an arithmetic overflow (it does not fulfill its contract of computing a good approximation to the mathematical sum); or a routine may fail to meet its postcondition. Exception: an abnormal event occurring during the execution of a routine (that routine is the "recipient" of
Social pressure is a major influence on the scope of exceptions and use of exception-handling mechanisms, i.e. "examples of use, typically found in core libraries, and code examples in technical books, magazine articles, and online discussion forums, and in an organization’s code standards".
Where necessary, the exception can be caught and recovered from—for instance, the operation could be restarted in software using arbitrary-precision arithmetic. In many cases, the task or the programmer can guarantee that the integer values in a specific application will not grow large enough to cause an overflow.
Variable-length arithmetic operations are considerably slower than fixed-length format floating-point instructions. When high performance is not a requirement, but high precision is, variable length arithmetic can prove useful, though the actual accuracy of the result may not be known.
Pointer arithmetic, that is, the ability to modify a pointer's target address with arithmetic operations (as well as magnitude comparisons), is restricted by the language standard to remain within the bounds of a single array object (or just after it), and will otherwise invoke undefined behavior.
(The term "exception" as used in IEEE 754 is a general term meaning an exceptional condition, which is not necessarily an error, and is a different usage to that typically defined in programming languages such as a C++ or Java, in which an "exception" is an alternative flow of control, closer to what is termed a "trap" in IEEE 754 terminology.)
The Java programming language and Java software platform have been criticized for design choices including the implementation of generics, forced object-oriented programming, the handling of unsigned numbers, the implementation of floating-point arithmetic, and a history of security vulnerabilities in the primary Java VM implementation, HotSpot.
Most assembly languages will have a macro instruction or an interrupt address available for the particular system to intercept events such as illegal op codes, program check, data errors, overflow, divide by zero, and other such.