[ I promised myself that I wouldn't re-enter the fray...  Another promise
broken.  When will I learn not to promise the impossible? ]

I've been thinking about this nit for a couple of days now, and I think that
Martin Wirblat made excellent points -- please review his note, if you're of
a mind to.  I agree with everything he wrote.

Furthermore, I'd like to re-iterate what several people have now said.  It's
not practical to slow the whole system down to guard against this rare error
condition.  Proper bounds checking in this case is the responsibility of the
sender.  I recommend updating the comment in the method to document the
error condition and to leave the code unchanged.

---==> Chris

PS>  This has been an interesting discussion.  It's forced me to think a bit
about an area that I've taken for granted for a long, long time.  :-)