On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 7:10 PM, Jason Cipriani <jason.cipriani@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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 would use them for network errors. Depending upon why files may be missing, I may or may not use them for that purpose. I would definitely not use them for invalid user input. I suppose where I would draw the line is whether or not the system has control over the inputs in question. For example, if a file is expected to exist because another system or a user is supposed to create the file, exceptions shouldn't be used. I will say, though, that this is how I use exceptions in C++. I'm much more lax with exception usage in languages like Python and possibly Java (I don't have that much experience with Java, but I did use exceptions for flow control in order to implement an ISO-8601 parser whose grammar seemed to require some lookahead, but I may just have lacked the skills to eliminate this (mis)use of exceptions). Noel
