Question

Given this code:

int x = 20000;
int y = 20000;
int z = 40000;

// Why is it printing WTF? Isn't 40,000 > 32,767?
if ((x + y) == z) Console.WriteLine("WTF?");

And knowing an int can hold −32,768 to +32,767. Why doesn’t this cause an overflow?

Answer 1

In C#, the int type is mapped to the Int32 type, which is always 32-bits, signed.

Even if you use short, it still won’t overflow because short + short returns an int by default. If you cast this int to short – (short)(x + y) – you’ll get an overflowed value. You won’t get an exception though. You can use checked behavior to get an exception:

using System;

namespace TestOverflow
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            short x = 20000;
            short y = 20000;
            short z;

            Console.WriteLine("Overflowing with default behavior...");
            z = (short)(x + y);
            Console.WriteLine("Okay! Value is {0}. Press any key to overflow " +
                "with 'checked' keyword.", z);
            Console.ReadKey(true);

            z = checked((short)(x + y));
        }
    }
}

You can find information about checked (and unchecked) on MSDN. It basically boils down to performance, because checking for overflow is a little bit slower than ignoring it (and that’s why the default behavior is usually unchecked, but I bet that in some compilers/configurations you’ll get an exception on the first z assignment.)