SAX/C++: C++-specific design principles

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> "Mark D. Anderson" <mda at discerning.com>:

> Unlike java or perl, exceptions in C++ are a bit of a land mine, 
[snip!]

Se Items 9 through 15, and in particular Item 15 "Understand the costs
of exception handling", in Scott Meyers' "More Effective C++"
	http://www.awl.com/cseng/titles/0-201-63371-X/
for more detail on this.

> Not to mention the fact that there is no standard for cross-language
> exception raising.

> choices seem to be:
> - return an error code
> - return a boolean success/failure
> - use C++ exceptions
> - call an error handler and return 0 (which may not get run if the
>   error handler aborts)
> - some combination of the above, configurable by the programmer

Personally I'm partial to allocate the "return value" in the caller,
and give a reference argument to this value and return a status code,
rather than returning the value itself, e.g.
	bool getValue(int index, string& value);
rather than
	const string& getValue(int index);

The syntax is more clumsy, but the memory management is easier (I'm
also partial to allocate objects on the stack in the caller, rather
than doing new).

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