Code Craft

Managing Errors

The common principle uniting the raising and handling of errors is to have a consistent strategy for dealing with failure, wherever it manifests. These are general considerations for managing the occurrence, detection, and handling of program errors:

• Avoid things that could cause errors. Can you do something that is guaranteed to work, instead? For example, avoid allocation errors by reserving enough resource beforehand. With an assured pool of memory, your routine cannot suffer memory restrictions. Naturally, this will only work when you know how much resource you need up front, but you often do.

• Define the program or routine’s expected behavior under abnormal circumstances. This determines how robust the code needs to be and therefore ...