Re: Exception misinformation

Lukas Smith wrote:

Justin Patrin wrote:

I still wonder about this, though, as many experienced coders say that Exceptions shouldn't be used for code flow handling.

Using exceptions means using exceptions as a straight forward goto. For example you call a method login() which checks the credentials of the user. Now you could throw an exception if the user is not logged in to send him to a different part of your code. Hmm maybe someone else can come up with an even clearer example. But a login method not being able to log someone in is usually not an error and certainly not an exception thing.

Sounds like a really bad example ;-) If you call login() you receive true for a succeeded login, or false for a failed login. An exception would be thrown if the function encountered problems that hinder the function in returning true or false, for example because the database-connection went down. The function won't be able to check wether the login is right or wrong, and so it throws an exception. This is a big difference from just returning false because the login went wrong... I'd say that an exception should be thrown every time a function/method can't fulfill it's very own purpose. Stephan