On Sep 13, 2007, at 5:54 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:
Howard Hinnant wrote:
I am requesting comments, both for and against a "sticky exception". A sticky exception is one in which once thrown, is very hard to catch and handle, without an implicit rethrow. This represents some condition which the thrower believes is sufficiently severe that the application (or thread) should clean up resources, but not be allowed to continue, even with a catch (...) which does not rethrow.
Here are a two arguments against:
1) The whole point of throwing an exception is that the program _can_ recover and not just clean up and exit.
2) If I write catch(...) in a destructor, I would be unpleasently surprised if it ends up throwing after all.
What use cases do you have in mind anyway?
Thanks Emil. I'm conducting a personal sanity check. Some people just do this with a dipstick. I prefer to consult with my colleagues on boost. :-) I will definitely answer your question but I'd prefer not to for another day or two. I'm hoping to not influence other's answers one way or another for now. I'm exploring a design space of a sensitive subject, and saying more than I have risks tainting the unbiased responses I'm seeking. I very much appreciate you posting your arguments and hope others will do so as well. -Howard