>> However, the reading is larger than the biggest possible 16 bit integer, a conversion is tried and fails. Usually, a well-designed system would have a procedure built-in to handle an overflow error and send a sensible message to the main computer. This, however, wasn’t one of those cases.

This is so unbelievably untrue. I've never seen code anywhere that waits to fail before doing the right thing.

This is exactly why I think exceptions are mostly useless, someone has to anticipate the problem, so why not write something that works right the first time. There are cases where exceptions can happen, but I don't think floating point arithmetic should be considered one of those cases.