"Geoff Leyland" <gley001@ec.auckland.ac.nz> wrote in message news:D6E59621-5B82-11D8-B48C-000A95DB9BF6@ec.auckland.ac.nz...
On 10/02/2004, at 5:00 PM, Jonathan Turkanis wrote:
(you can add more information) and an ostringstream (you can catch it as a std::exception) and it lends itself to further extension.
Throwing a streamy exception has small advantages over a const char
Definitely! Throwing a const char* is always a bad idea, since no one expects to catch a const char*, and even if you write a const char* handler there's no way to tell in advance that you will be able to handle the error represented by the const char*. In general, you cannot throw a stringstream, since streams need not be copyable.
For small programs written by one person these issues are not so important. (These are also the cases where you can get away with thowing int or const char* ;-)
Yes. And in cases where you might get away with an int or const char *, something nicer might make things even easier.
The question is: is this what Boost is about? Perhaps Boost shouldn't be encouraging programming like this, perhaps some users of Boost are writing clunky command like computational code.
I think boost should encourage best practices, not practices which work acceptably only in limited circumstances without providing substantial benefits. For miscellaneous errors, you can use one the standard exception classes, such as runtime_error, using a stringstream to format the results, if you like: stringstream s; s << "somebody made " << x << " mistakes"; throw runtime_error(s.str()); This gives you the results you want, doesn't it? Is it really that inconvenient? Jonathan