Summary

Producing reliable software is serious business. Exception handling and defect removal should be approached with extreme rigor. Thorough testing then debugging of a software component should be the primary defense against software defects. Exception handling should be added to the software system or subsystem after the software has undergone rigorous testing. Throwing exceptions should not be used as a generic error handling technique because it destroys the flow of control of the program. Exceptions should only be thrown after all of the measures have been exhausted. The standard exception handling classes should be used as architectural road maps for the programmer who wishes to design more complete and useful exception classes. If not specialized through inheritance, the standard classes can only report errors. More useful exception classes can be built that have corrective functionality as well as more information. In general, both the termination and resumption models allow the program to continue to execute. Both models resist simply aborting the program when an error occurs. For a more complete discussion of exception handling, see The Design and Evolution of C++ (Stroustrup, 1994).