Improved
error recovery
is one of the most powerful ways you can increase the robustness of your code.
show
how you can make several function calls with only one catch, thus greatly
reducing the amount of error-handling code you must write.
Unfortunately,
it’s almost accepted practice to ignore error conditions, as if
we’re in a state of denial about errors. Some of the reason is no doubt
the tediousness and code bloat of checking for many errors. For example,
printf( )
returns the number of characters that were successfully printed, but virtually
no one checks this value. The proliferation of code alone would be disgusting,
not to mention the difficulty it would add in reading the code.
The
problem with C’s approach to error handling could be thought of as one of
coupling – the user of a function must tie the error-handling code so
closely to that function that it becomes too ungainly and awkward to use.
One
of the major features in C++ is
exception
handling
,
which is a better way of thinking about and handling errors. With exception
handling,
Error-handling
code is not nearly so tedious to write, and it doesn't become mixed up with
your "normal" code. You write the code you
want
to happen; later in a separate section you write the code to cope with the
problems. If you make multiple calls to a function, you handle the errors from
that function once, in one place.
Errors
cannot be ignored. If a function needs to send an error message to the caller
of that function, it “throws” an object representing that error out
of the function. If the caller doesn’t “catch” the error and
handle it, it goes to the next enclosing scope, and so on until
someone
catches the error.
This
chapter examines C’s approach to error handling (such as it is), why it
did not work very well for C, and why it won’t work at all for C++. Then
you’ll learn about
try,
throw,and
catch,
the C++ keywords that support exception handling.