Spec says,

"""All of the details in the Spec concerning overflow are ignored, as BigIntegers are made as large as necessary to accommodate the results of an operation."""

BUT a colleague reports:

BigDecimal and BigInteger document some cases where they throw ArithmeticException (eg. division by 0), but there are other cases where they throw but which aren't documented.

For example:

  BigInteger.TEN.pow(1000000000);

and

    BigDecimal x = new BigDecimal("1e1000000000");
    x.add(new BigDecimal(1));

both throw (after running for a long time). Here's an example stacktrace:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ArithmeticException: BigInteger would overflow supported range
        at java.math.BigInteger.reportOverflow(BigInteger.java:1084)
        at java.math.BigInteger.checkRange(BigInteger.java:1079)
        at java.math.BigInteger.<init>(BigInteger.java:1055)
        at java.math.BigInteger.shiftLeft(BigInteger.java:3073)
        at java.math.BigInteger.multiplyToomCook3(BigInteger.java:1740)
        at java.math.BigInteger.multiply(BigInteger.java:1512)
        at java.math.BigInteger.pow(BigInteger.java:2302)
        at java.math.BigDecimal.bigTenToThe(BigDecimal.java:3543)
        at java.math.BigDecimal.bigMultiplyPowerTen(BigDecimal.java:4508)
        at java.math.BigDecimal.add(BigDecimal.java:4443)
        at java.math.BigDecimal.add(BigDecimal.java:1289)
        at Main.main(Main.java:9)