Re: [boost] Exception lib proposal update: what()

From: Marshall Clow (marshall_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-08-22 13:58:18

gchen opined:
>Emil Dotchevski wrote:
>>  Hello,
>>
>>  I just finished an update to the exception library I am planning to propose
>>  for addition to Boost. I appreciate all feedback, including incompatibility
>>  reports with various compilers (I believe the implementation to be
>>  standard-conforming, but I have only tested with msvc 7.1/8.0 and gcc
>>  3.4.4).
>>
>[...]
>
>I am not a exception expert, but I am just wondering, why the exception
>library does not support UNICODE. Is there any technical restriction?
>
>If a exception library support UNICODE as , we can throw user friendly
>message.

I think this is the wrong way to go, especially in a multi-lingual world.

You should throw an error code (and some additional) information, and
create an error message to display to the user at a higher level. This
means that your low-level code (which could be throwing the exception)
doesn't need to know the details of displaying the error message (in an alert
on the screen, or written to a log file, or sent to a pager, or ?) nor the
language in which the error message will be displayed in
(English, German, Italian, Uzbeki, ?? ).

[ Note that this is not a rejection of Unicode, but rather a separation of
the error being detected and thrown and the creation of an error message ]

Just my 2p.
-- 
-- Marshall
Marshall Clow     Idio Software   <mailto:marshall_at_[hidden]>
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
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the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.