In one form, a software system includes a first non-transitory computer readable medium storing a source code program, a second computer readable medium, and a compiler. The first non-transitory computer readable medium includes a first function having a return type greater than a native width of a target processor, and a second function that calls the first function and that conditionally branches based on comparing a returned value from the first function to an expected value, wherein the expected value has first and second portions that are not equal to zero and are not equal to each other. The compiler converts the source code program in the first non-transitory computer readable medium into a machine language program for storage in the second computer readable medium. The compiler optimizes the source code program by selectively combining a set of redundant machine language instructions into a smaller set of machine language instructions.