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From: Alan.Griffiths_at_[hidden]
Date: 2003-09-08 10:12:30


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Daron Anderson [mailto:dnanderson_at_[hidden]]
>
> I have had much success using this 'wrapping' approach. On one of the
> projects I am working on, I have required that all team
> members catch all exceptions not derived from std::exception at the
> subsystem/package level and only rethrow specialisations of
> std::exception. I have also required
> that no MI be used in exception hierarchies.

Thanks Daron for confirming that this practice isn't soley an abberation of
mine. And confirming the view that "no MI" is a viable design guideline for
exception hierarchies. Client code written to these rules would not benefit
from the proposed guideline.

But, regardless of what you or I do, users of boost can multiply inherit
from the boost exceptions and from another hierarchy that also inherits from
std::exception. If they also try to catch the resulting exceptions as a
reference to the std::exception base class then they may be surprised at the
result if they don't realise that it is ambiguous.

This is a typical issue with MI: classes (exceptions or otherwise) that are
not designed for it should be extended in this way with extreme caution
because "fixes" in the derived class are problematic.

-- 
Alan Griffiths
http://www.octopull.demon.co.uk/ 
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