On 11/18/2013 2:37 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 11/18/13 1:50 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
I believe this is solving the problem in the wrong place. The function
being called should not be throwing, and should be defined as not
throwing. See my other posts in this thread on the topic.
I think a stance of unceremoniously halting the program upon passing the wrong
parameters to a standard library function is a bit excessive.
Dang, I gotta argue this with you too? :-)
Forget the philosophical argument for the moment and let's try a pragmatic one -
code that doesn't check its arguments and doesn't throw is going to inline
better, run faster, and be smaller. To have a high performance language, we have
to have this.
This is why we have a -release switch: so we can run with or without checking
the arguments for bugs.
Input data validation is where exceptions come in. Those are relatively rare
compared with processing validated data, and so separating out the slow data
validation path from the validated high speed path makes pragmatic sense.
Rejecting this approach throws (!) out the whole concept of contract
programming.
