Theory on error handling?

Question

Most advice concerning error handling boils down to a handful of tips and tricks (see this post for example). These hints are helpful but I think they don\'t answer all question

Answer 1

I'm changing my design and coding philosophy so that:

1. If all runs smoothly, as expected, no errors generated.
2. Throw an exception if something different, or unexpected happens; let the caller handle it.
3. If it can't be resolved, propagate it up a higher level.

Hopefully, with this technique, the issues that get propagated to the User will be very important; otherwise the program tries to resolve them.

I'm currently experiencing issues that get lost in the return codes; or new return codes are created.