The C++ committee could come up with actual syntax for this so it doesn't need macros. > There's no enforcement of any kind that anything is checked as a resul

The C++ committee could come up with actual syntax for this so it doesn't need macros. > There's no enforcement of any kind that anything is checked as a result. There's some hoop-jumping with friend classes to "hide" the readMaybe() function to make the non-macro usage as ugly as possible to strongly encourage using the macro-convention, but that's hardly "enforcement". Sure fine. Anyone who wants to reach into the internal APIs could also just as easily do `#define private public` and bypass every protection C++ has. We're not trying to defend against malicious developers here.