"Pete d'Oronzio" <✉pdmagic.com> wrote in message
news:3b76b1c3_1@dnews...

>....<snip>
> I'm not sure if this is a cut-and-dried question, or if I'm starting a
> religious war.  Either way, I'm very interested in the response.

Pete,


I'm not sure what you have already read, but back in June we had a big
discussion on this issue under a thread which yours truly initiated under
the title "Exceptions should be banned?".
Rest assured that this theme does awaken lots of personal opinions related
to programming style.


Exceptions are being used everywhere, in the VCL, in the RTL, in third-party
components. Unless you write all of your own code (including your own
framework) it is unlikely that your program will be entirely consistent in
terms of exception raising behaviour.


From what I've seen in that discussion, the majority of Delphites believes
strongly in an active usage of exceptions and relying on robust, state-free
code combined with an intelligent top-level (default) exception handler. As
you will also see from the referenced discussion, I am not among the
Delphite majority in this respect.


I am not eager to have another major discussion on this point now, but FWIW
let me summarize my current opinion on this issue:


I think it is inappropriate to raise exceptions for 'normal' error cases, or
as a means of regular flow control; this, IMO, imposes too many constraints
on the user of such code. I much prefer using error codes which enable me to
decide how to react to an anomaly at the point where it happens (close to
the source of error). In any case, exception-generating code (i.e. any code
which uses Raise) should IMO be carefully documented as such.
As for 'criticality' judgement on errors, there's the real catch (excuse the
pun! <g>). How does a programmer (e.g. component writer) determine what is a
'critical'/unrecoverable error and what is not?


So: In the real world, be prepared for exceptions anywhere. One thing I've
learnt from these discussions is that it's impossible to crusade against
other programmers' preferences. So you've gotta be prepared for anything,
anytime.
Sucks, doesn't it. <g>


Kristofer