Ensuring that Exceptions are always caught

"No.

See A Pragmatic Look at Exception Specifications for reasons why not.

The only way you can ""help"" this is to document the exceptions your function can throw, say as a comment in the header file declaring it. This is not enforced by the compiler or anything. Use code reviews for that purpose."

"You shouldn't be using an exception here. This obviously isn't an exceptional case if you need to be expecting it everywhere you use this function!

A better solution would be to get the function to return an instance of something like this. In debug builds (assuming developers exercise code paths they've just written), they'll get an assert if they forget to check whether the operation succeded or not.

class SearchResult
{
private:
ResultType result_;
bool succeeded_;
bool succeessChecked_;

public:
SearchResult(Result& result, bool succeeded)
: result_(result)
, succeeded_(succeeded)
, successChecked_(false)
{
}

~SearchResult()
{
ASSERT(successChecked_);
}

ResultType& Result() { return result_; }
bool Succeeded() { successChecked_ = true; return succeeded_; }
}"

"Outside the scope of your question so I debated not posting this but in Java there are actually 2 types of exceptions, checked and unchecked. The basic difference is that, much like in c[++], you dont have to catch an unchecked exception.

For a good reference try this"

"Chris' probably has the best pure answer to the question:

However, I'm curious about the root of the question. If the user should always wrap the call in a try/catch block, should the user-called function really be throwing exceptions in the first place?

This is a difficult question to answer without more context regarding the code-base in question. Shooting from the hip, I think the best answer here is to wrap the function up such that the recommended (if not only, depending on the overall exception style of the code) public interface does the try/catch for the user. If you're just trying to ensure that there are no unhandled exceptions in your code, unit tests and code review are probably the best solution."