Behavior of numeric::to_int() and numeric::to_long()

[Roberto Bagnara]

Richard B. Kreckel wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Roberto Bagnara wrote:
> 
>>These methods, and the corresponding functions taking
>>the argument as a const numeric& parameter, when something
>>goes wrong print a line of the form
>>
>>Not a 32-bit integer: -9223372028264841216
>>
>>on cerr and exit the program.  Wouldn't throwing a
>>suitable standard exception (like std::domain_error)
>>be a better option?
> 
> 
> Not really.  We want them to be fast.  They are intended for use in main
> loops only and if you look into the code you'll see that we don't even
> check whether they are actual integers.  The programmer should care about
> that...

I agree on what you say.  This is even stated in the documentation.

What I am saying is that, instead of writing "Not a 32-bit integer..."
and exiting, you could throw an exception.  This would not impede
performance, since the test now controlling the printing would then
control the throw.  The change I am proposing would make debugging
much easier and would make possible recovering from the error (and
this is the thing that is very important to us).
All the best

     Roberto

-- 
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it