How to indicate that a method was unsuccessful

Question

I have several similar methods, say eg. CalculatePoint(...) and CalculateListOfPoints(...). Occasionally, they may not succeed, and need to indicate this to the caller. For

Answer 1

It mostly depends on the behavior of your methods and their usage.

If failure is common and non-critical, then have your methods return a boolean indicating their success and use an out parameter to convey the result. Looking up a key in a hash, attempting to read data on a non-blocking socket when no data is available, all these examples fall in that category.

If failure is unexpected, return directly the result and convey errors with exceptions. Opening a file read-only, connecting to a TCP server, are good candidates.

And sometimes both ways make sense...