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Integer overflow can be demonstrated through an odometer overflowing, a mechanical version of the phenomenon. All digits are set to the maximum 9 and the next increment of the white digit causes a cascade of carry-over additions setting all digits to 0, but there is no higher digit (1,000,000s digit) to change to a 1, so the counter resets to zero.
LEDA provides four additional numerical representations alongside those built-in to C++: integer, rational, bigfloat, and real: LEDA's integer type offers an improvement over the built-in int datatype by eliminating the problem of overflow at the cost of unbounded memory usage for increasingly large numbers.
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic can also be used to avoid overflow, which is an inherent limitation of fixed-precision arithmetic. Similar to an automobile's odometer display which may change from 99999 to 00000, a fixed-precision integer may exhibit wraparound if numbers grow too
For integers, the term "integer underflow" typically refers to a special kind of integer overflow or integer wraparound condition whereby the result of subtraction would result in a value less than the minimum allowed for a given integer type, i.e. the ideal result was closer to negative infinity than the output type's representable value ...
For example, adjusting the volume level of a sound signal can result in overflow, and saturation causes significantly less distortion to the sound than wrap-around. In the words of researchers G. A. Constantinides et al.: [1] When adding two numbers using two's complement representation, overflow results in a "wrap-around" phenomenon.
[a] Thus, a signed 32-bit integer can only represent integer values from −(2 31) to 2 31 − 1 inclusive. Consequently, if a signed 32-bit integer is used to store Unix time, the latest time that can be stored is 2 31 − 1 (2,147,483,647) seconds after epoch, which is 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. [ 7 ]
Canaries or canary words or stack cookies are known values that are placed between a buffer and control data on the stack to monitor buffer overflows. When the buffer overflows, the first data to be corrupted will usually be the canary, and a failed verification of the canary data will therefore alert of an overflow, which can then be handled, for example, by invalidating the corrupted data.
The problem with the code is it does not check for integer overflow on the addition operation. If the sum of x and y is greater than the maximum possible value of an unsigned int, the addition operation will overflow and perhaps result in a value less than or equal to MAX, even though the sum of x and y is greater than MAX.