Here is a car analogy. It is like learning to drive and thinking that you are allowed to drive over a yellow-turning-to-red light. However the rules say, you should stop if you are physically able to. In reality almost everyone tries to get over than yellow. On a rare occasion they get spotted and pay the fine.

C strives for maximum performance, it will not check things for you if you don't ask it to. Having a library function that performs those checks for everyone, would go against that rule. Why would someone else have to pay the performance penalty for you? Write a wrapper or a macro that performs the check, couple of lines, it is that easy.

If you strive to write portable C code it should work regardless of signed representation. C defines all the range macros for types, and gives you types that guarantee certain ranges. Assuming you use those types and macros, I'm really curious what incantations, that couldn't been solved in a portable manner, require you to know the signed representation.

This should do it (off the cuff):

  typedef int NOT_TWOS_COMPLEMENT[(unsigned int) -1 == UINT_MAX ? 1 : -1];