Re: Checking for loss of information on integer conversion

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>
> Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2018 17:31:47 +0100
> 
> > However, I'd rather prioritize progress in computing horizontal
> > alignment and widths with variable-width fonts.  That is something
> > we really need.
> 
> I am tempted to argue that silently returning the wrong answer is a more
> serious (but admittedly less visible) issue than minor cosmetic limitations
> of the redisplay engine.

It's not a minor cosmetic limitation, it's a basic inability to line
up text displayed with a variable-pitch font.  It makes Emacs look
ugly and basically unusable when variable-pitch fonts are used to
display program source code, formatted text, tables, etc.  These are
all important and frequent use cases these days.

By contrast, silently returning a wrong result due to overflow is a
much more rare situation, especially since today 64-bit machines are
so ubiquitous.