A lot of people in this sub-thread don't buy that return codes are inferior, but they really are. The issue is that the low level code can detect the error and

A lot of people in this sub-thread don't buy that return codes are inferior, but they really are. The issue is that the low level code can detect the error and knows some strategies that could be done about it but it's only the high level code that knows what's best (here's the best possible approach [1]). If your library is used by a batch job running on some network-detached headless server it will probably have to handle errors differently than a fat client would. [1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-conditions-and-restarts.html http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-co...