PaulS:
I'm not going to write some crazy complex error handling routine for this particular purpose anyway, enough being to simply stop everything.
In CATIA, we have, occasionally, dialog boxes that pop up that say "Click OK to terminate", like someone would really want to.
The cause is almost always a result of failing to handle an exception. That sounds like what you are planning to implement.
I would strongly encourage you not to do that. Restarting the Arduino because of a type, or noise on the serial line, or some other strange input arriving is not a best practice. It's far better to simply ignore out-of-range data.
I completely agree with you, andI usually tend to spend quite some time on error handling. Especially because I'm not a professional programmer, so I'm going to use the code for myself, not for customers 
In this case I'm going to use abort() in a preliminary stage of the coding. I'm not going to bother much about providing valid alternative default values in case the input is going to be unacceptable. It's ok to me if it runs an infinite loop. It doesn't break anything at the moment. But it's good to know what it does precisely 