Ariane (yet again...)

["Mike Silva" <mjsilva@jps.net>]

Before anybody starts throwing anything, my question is very specific --
does anybody know exactly what the Ariane report means when it speaks of
"protecting" conversions?  The subject came up in alt.folklore.computers and
it seems there are at least three possible meanings: (a) turn off the
runtime checks for a given conversion, (b) put some code before the
conversion to explicitly check for in-range, or (c) have a local exception
handler to catch the error.  Anybody know what exactly was / was not done
(or even better, have an actual code fragment)?  I've just always been
curious...

Mike