Re: CFile and FILE*
On Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:59:24 -0500, Joseph M. Newcomer
<newcomer@flounder.com> wrote:
Never, ever call exit() in any C++ program, in any
Windows program, or, now that I stop to think of it, in any program, ever, for any reason.
Existing files will not be properly closed, for example, in any kind of program, including
console apps. There are too many things that can go wrong. I had made it a policy to
NEVER call exit() by 1980 or so (I was still faculty at CMU at the time, and I left in
early 1981). It is a lazy hack that avoids writing reliable and robust code.
FWIW, exit() flushes and closes files. There is a non-standard function
_exit which doesn't do this. In many console programs, it is perfectly fine
to use exit(exit_code) as the last statement of a fatal(exit_code, msg)
function. For example, I can't imagine why grep would want to avoid using
exit() in this way. In a more complex C++ console program, I can see
preferring exceptions to exit() and indeed I've done just that, but I hate
the fact that it's possible to swallow a FatalError exception. I really
wish there were a class of exceptions that could not be caught by
catch(...), could not be derived from anything, and which if caught
explicitly, force a rethrow at the end of the catch block.
--
Doug Harrison
Visual C++ MVP