On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:36 PM, me22 <me22.ca@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 10:10 PM, Jason Cipriani > > <jason.cipriani@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 8:23 AM, John Love-Jensen <eljay@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > In my projects, throwing an exception mean "the application is about to > > > terminate." > > > > > > That's using the exception mechanism at the extreme of conservative > > > programming with exceptions. > > > > > > Assuming you use exceptions with less draconian policy, the exception > > > mechanism is not for using as normal flow control. It really means an > > > exceptional situation, outside of the normal flow control. > > > > > > For normal flow control -- such as handling predictable, common error > > > conditions -- you should use return codes. > > > > It seems that the root of any disagreement is what kinds of errors > > we'd prefer to represent with exceptions. You and Ted would use them > > for rare, fatal error conditions, similar in spirit to machine > > exceptions such as access violations and invalid instructions. I would > > use them for more common errors such as invalid user input, missing > > files, network errors, etc. I have a hunch nobody is going to be > > having a change of heart any time soon. :-) One thing that I have > > often noticed, incidentally, is that the longer a programmer has been > > programming before C++, the more they prefer error codes to > > exceptions. > > > > Personally, I think that if something can't happen, like a divide by > zero, is a case for an assert, not an exception. Leave them in the > release if you want, but better, fix them! > > I prefer using exceptions for things that you'd rather never happened, > and if everything does perfectly, never will happen. (Which also > means that their performance doesn't matter.) Especially when those > are the kinds of things that can rarely be handled locally. I like > having a fairly clean code path. > > Also, exceptions thrown in constructors mean tighter invariants that > you just can't get with return codes. 2-phase construction is evil. > > > [snip exceptionally long post that I didn't actually read, sorry :P ] That's OK :-) I don't think I actually read it, either! I did actually specifically mention that throwing exceptions from constructors leads to tighter invariants. I think you pretty much said everything I said in that last post, but a lot more efficiently. Jason > > >
