“We do not use C++ exceptions” — What's the alternative? Let it crash?

Question

\"We do not use C++ exceptions.\"

If you don\'t use exceptions, what happens when there\'s an error? You just let the program crash?

Answer 1

No, the alternative is to do what people have done for ages in C... you return an error status code that indicates whether the function succeeded or not, and depending on the ways in which it can fail, you might have one or more out parameteters in which you indicate the way in which it failed (or you incorporate the type of failure in the error status code, again it's a case-by-case thing).