Andy,

Thank you for your response.

The concern I'm raising is less about "How do I avoid overflow?" and more about "Why are we avoiding the specification of saturating instructions, or an overflow flag?"

I can always avoid overflow by using smaller numbers, or using a larger data path. Sometimes, I won't know that I've exceeded my data path limits. Sure, design for safe margins, yet we rely on hardware signaling to inform us when we've gone beyond a hard limit. Another way of stating the question: Why NOT have saturation or overflow for these instructions? The alternative is a silent data corruption.