Re: Proposal: A block between "try" and "catch".

From:
Marsh Ray <marsh527@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:28:28 CST
Message-ID:
<fa828341-1331-4aa6-9735-4d7aa2e5df09@2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com>
On Jun 5, 4:22 am, "Adam H. Peterson" <alpha.eta...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have an exception handling proposal for the language.


There's a good chance that:

1. Something almost as good is implementable as a library with scary-clever
    techniques already in the standard language.

2. Something just as good will be implementable as a library once you can use
    a conforming implementation of C++ 0x.

3. Your proposed language extension will not gain support.

     try {
          T var;
     } <---- Every other closing curly brace in C++ destructs var.
     catch void . . .

4. If your language extension is accepted, you will still have
    to use (1) or (2) for the next 5 - 10 years.

But perhaps there's something good for (1) or (2) . . .

For example, I may have something like:

try {
     Object ob("data"); // May throw range_error

     // This may also throw range_error,
     // but I don't want to catch this one
     do_something_else(ob, "other data");

} catch (range_error e) {
     // handle the failed construction of ob.
}

The key here is that if ob fails to construct, I don't want to execute
do_something_else(), so I can't put the catch block next to the
construction. (This is especially true since that would shorten ob's
lifetime.) However, do_something_else() throws exceptions of the same
type as the ones I'm interested in from Object().


Ideas:

   * Make the other code in your project handle the range_error exception, so
     you can just propagate it upwards.

   * Basic re-org one:

     // an anonymous block keeps same lifetime of Object instance.
     {
         some_smart_pointer<Object> ob_ptr;

         try
         {
             ob_ptr.reset(new Object("data"));
         }
         catch (range_error e) {
             // as before.
         }

         if (ob_ptr)
         {
             Object & ob = *ob_ptr; // For the remainder of this block 'ob' looks
                      // almost exactly like it did before.

             do_something_else(ob, "other data");
         }
     }

     Obvious drawbacks:
         More verbose.
         Additional heap allocation.

   * Boost::optional with in-place factories avoids need for
     heap alloaction Re-org two:

     {
         boost::Optional<Object> ob_opt;

         try
         {
             ob_opt = boost::in_place("data"); // I think this should work . . .

             The rest is pretty much the same as re-org one.

     Obvious drawbacks:
         More verbose.
         Boost::optional and in_place are not perfect for everything.

   * You mentioned conditional rethrowing. Looks like that might macro-ize well!
     Why wouldn't this work?
     Re-org three:

     EXTENDED_TRY_MACRO // for (bool uniqueName = true; uniqueName; uniqueName = false) try
     {
         Object ob("data"); // May throw range_error

         STOP_CATCHING_MACRO // uniqueName = false;

         do_something_else(ob, "other data");
     }
     catch (range_error & e) // Note: now catching by reference
     {
         EXTENDED_CATCH_MACRO // if (!uniqueName) throw;

         // as before
     }

     Benefits:
         Scope of ob remains natural.

     Obvious drawbacks:
         Everyone knows macros are bad.

- Marsh

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