My question here is in terms of concept.
Background
Donald Knuth once mentioned about a case where sometimes his merge sort failed once in a while. Later on he found out that it's due to the maximum value being exceeded while trying to find the mid-value between two integers.
The code had to be changed from this:
int mid = (left + right) / 2;
to this:
int mid = left + (right-left)/2;
My question:
I'm just curious why Java doesn't throw the Overflow Error instead of silently returning unexpected result. I feel that it's just semantically wrong that the program deliberately continues with the wrong outcome.
One possible argument that I cant think of here is in context of bit operation. It may be too troublesome to incorporate the Overflow Error while doing the binary operations.
But still I would argue that if that's the case then Java should throw the Overflow Error when an arithmetical operation such as +, -, *, / is used and ignores the Overflow Error when dealing only with binary operations such as >>, >>>, <<, etc.
Not sure about the other programming languages, but I suspect it's quite similar. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
So, any reasoning behind this?
EDIT:
As marked by Luiggi, this is a duplicate question. I've got my answers in the given links over there.
