Fixed by Mark H Weaver, on Fri, 7 Dec 2012.
Avoid signed integer overflow in scm_product
* libguile/numbers.c (scm_product): Avoid signed integer overflow, which modern C compilers are allowed to assume will never happen, thus allowing them to optimize out our overflow checks.
* test-suite/tests/numbers.test (*): Add tests.
(2^244 is being shown as zero. 2^488 is being shown as non-zero; presumably the right value though I haven't actually checked. If 2^244 is actually being computed as zero, then unless what's happening somehow depends on the depth of the stack -- surely not possible if this bug is the cause -- 2^488 should be computed as zero squared, which is zero.)
What am I missing here?
Although the specification says this behaviour is undefined in practice I used to map the undefined portion to being whatever my hardware did, not whatever the compiler felt like this week.
This ruins the C as a portable assembler use case and means if I was doing this sort of work I'd probably write these sort of routines in assembler rather than trying to fight with versions of C compiler.