Mark Dickinson added the comment:

I guess the feeling of wrongness for me mostly comes from the floating-point 
world, where the IEEE 754 'overflow' floating-point exception is only 
appropriate for cases where the result is *finite* but so large that it falls 
outside the representable range for a float.  Regarding conversions from 
floating-point formats to integer formats, IEEE 754 says: "When a NaN or 
infinite operand cannot be represented in the destination format and this 
cannot otherwise be indicated, the invalid operation exception shall be 
signaled." To the extent that there's a convention at all, we typically map 
'invalid operation exceptions' to ValueError.  (See the comments at the top of 
Modules/mathmodule.c.)

There's also the minor practical inconvenience of having to remember to catch 
OverflowError *and* ValueError in try: .. except: constructs.

On the other side, there's a very real possibility of breaking code with this 
change.

I'll leave this open for a week or so, but unless there's a strong consensus 
that this should be changed, I propose to close as "won't fix".

----------
assignee:  -> mark.dickinson

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue16483>
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