Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

Software Exceptions

So far, we have been discussing hardware exceptions in which the CPU catches an event and raises an exception. It is also possible for your code to forcibly raise an exception. This is another way for a function to indicate failure to its caller. Traditionally, functions that can fail return some special value to indicate failure. The caller of the function is supposed to check for this special value and take an alternative course of action. Frequently, the caller has to clean up what it’s doing and return its own failure code back to its caller. This propagating of error codes causes your source code to become much more difficult to write and maintain.

An alternative approach is to have functions raise exceptions when they ...