Thorsten Ottosen wrote:
Anyway, my feeling is that people that uses BOOST_NO_EXCEPTION would prefer
if( foo() ) BOOST_THROW_EXCEPTION( std::exception, "MSG" );
where this expands to BOOST_ASSERT( "MSG" ) when BOOST_NO_EXCEPTION is true.
This very much depends on foo(). In your case I suspect that foo() validates an input argument and the outer function is something similar to vector<>::at. Think about in which circumstances one would use at() - a function that "recovers gracefully" from input arguments out of range by throwing an exception - as opposed to operator[], a function that uses BOOST_ASSERT to check the input. Presumably, the client that calls at() _expects_ an exception when an out of range argument is passed, and this exception is handled somewhere; this indicates that out of range arguments to at() are expected and this code path forms an ordinary part of the program. If out of range input arguments were unexpected, one would use operator[], possibly guarded by a user-level assert. To get back to throw_exception, I guess my point is that nothing is gained by turning the throw into an assert, because people that wanted an assert would use the asserting function, not the throwing function. And of course in a situation where throw_exception is used to throw bad_alloc, an assertion makes even less sense, because there are no "logic errors" involved, and presenting the effects of a failed assertion to the end user would serve little purpose; the program could do nothing to defend itself from the out of memory situation.