C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

70. Distinguish between errors and non-errors

Summary

A breach of contract is an error: A function is a unit of work. Thus, failures should be viewed as errors or otherwise based on their impact on functions. Within a function f, a failure is an error if and only if it violates one of f’s preconditions or prevents f from meeting any of its callees’ preconditions, achieving any of f’s own postconditions, or reestablishing any invariant that f shares responsibility for maintaining.

In particular, here we exclude internal programming errors (i.e., where the caller and callee are the responsibility of the same person or team, such as inside a module), which are a separate category normally dealt with using assertions (see Item 68).

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