Re: [boost] Boost debug facilities

From: Darin Adler (darin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-04 02:29:02

On Sunday, November 3, 2002, at 02:00  PM, Beman Dawes wrote:

> Surely your debugger allows you to trap the exception at the point it 
> is thrown, so that the stack (and everything else) at that point is 
> available for inspection? Isn't that equivalent to getting a core 
> dump, yet preserves the benefits of exceptions in non-debugging 
> environments?

In the programming environments I use, the debugger allows me to either 
trap all exceptions at the point they are thrown, or none at all. I 
don't know of any environment that lets you express which exceptions 
are expected and which are not.

The problem is that during normal operation of most of my programs, 
occasional exceptions are thrown and caught by code that expects them. 
It's very hard to set up an environment where any exception that 
indicates a programming error will drop into the debugger, but any 
exception that simply indicates an unusual runtime condition will not.

This is a reason I strongly prefer asserts to exceptions to indicate 
programming errors.

     -- Darin