Which is why we assume pointers may be NULL. Not so with references. Everything you've just said misses the point by such a wide margin that I don't know where to begin, and I don't have time to finish right now, so I'll just say this:
When a precondition is violated, the programmer that violates it "is the problem." I advocate a system that requires fewer preconditions, and thus offers fewer opportunities for anyone to "be the problem." It looks to me that you are talking about different things. I think Ion agrees about invariants but advocating an interface that can be used without exceptions, to make the library accessible to the
On 2/16/06, David Abrahams <dave@boost-consulting.com> wrote: platforms with no exception available. And without exceptions, you can't ensure that no object with invalid state is constructed. So there is two choices - or to provide an exception-only interface and strong invariants, or to allow the library to be used in a restricting embedded environment. Please correct me if I'm wrong. -- Best regards, Zigmar