Exception Specifications

[Perry Smith]

On Dec 6, 2006, at 9:21 AM, John Love-Jensen wrote:

> Hi Perry,
>
> I only use "no throw" specification, i.e., throw(), on functions that
> absolutely guarantee that they do not throw.  And I use it  
> sparingly, only
> on my functions that really shouldn't throw, ever, such as swap  
> functions,
> and I know (a priori) that those functions will never throw.
>
> NOTE:  I have been stung by writing a "no throw" function,  
> annotated with
> throw(), and even commented in the contract comments, yet someone  
> later put
> in some additional "helpful" tracing/debugging facilities that did  
> throw in
> some situations... no joy in Mudville.  Caveat emptor.
>
> I do not put itemized throw specifications on functions.
>
> I highly recommend C++ Coding Standards by Sutter and Alexandrescu, in
> particular the section on Error Handling and Exceptions.
>
> Moreso, I highly recommend all of Sutter's books on C++.

Thanks.  I've been surfing the past few minutes and bumped into two  
of Sutter's books: Exceptional C++ and More Exceptional C++.  They  
look interesting.

The one place that I'm a little disappointed is that you can do this:

int foo()
{
     throw 92;
}

int dog() nothrow()
{
     foo();
}

Of course, the code produced catches that at run time but I'm looking  
for something somehow to tag my functions so that "mistakes" like  
this are caught at compile time.  (Similar to what happened to you.   
I'm looking for a way to catch that at compile time.)  I wonder if g+ 
+ has a compile time flag to catch that.

Perry Smith ( pedz@easesoftware.com )
Ease Software, Inc. ( http://www.easesoftware.com )

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