Re: Should accessors throw exception ?

From:

James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:11:15 -0700 (PDT)

Message-ID:

<e5f7a41f-6b48-40f4-83e9-069899b7c046@y38g2000hsy.googlegroups.com>

On Sep 13, 12:55 am, Ian Collins <ian-n...@hotmail.com> wrote:

mathieu wrote:

I'd like to know if there is a general answer to the
following question: when making a public interface that
access a container should the function throw an exception
when the element is not found ? Otherwise I need two
functions: a Find and a Get function which put the burden on
the application programmer to always call Find before Get.

I tend to favour returning NULL if the return type is a
pointer and throwing an exception if the return type is a
reference or an object without an obvious bad value.

Isn't this inversing cause and effect. I tend to choose to
return a pointer if I need a sentinel value, and a reference
otherwise.

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