On 4 October 2013 17:45, Eric Niebler
On 10/4/2013 9:20 AM, Matt Calabrese wrote:
but I definitely am against an exception for this type of programmer error.
This is the crux of it. If this condition really does represent a programmer error (and IMO in this case it does), then Matt is right. Throwing is wrong. Programmer error == bug == your program is already in some weird state. Continuing by throwing an exception and executing an arbitrary amount of code is not good.
I don't think this is always the case. For example, unexpected output from a parser should not be an indicator of an error in the global state.
Precondition violations ==> assertions. Use BOOST_ASSERT. That gives people a way to hook the behavior while giving a sane default.
If throwing an exception when this is null is a bad idea, then not checking in release mode is surely a terrible one.