I agree with the other comments that this understanding of exceptions is wrong. He's not wrong about these two points: - Correctness: you don’t know if the ex

I agree with the other comments that this understanding of exceptions is wrong. He's not wrong about these two points: - Correctness: you don’t know if the exception type you’ve caught matches what the code throws - Exhaustiveness: you don’t know if you’ve caught all exceptions the code can throw But that's actually not a problem. Most of the time you shouldn't catch a specific exception (so always correct) and if you are catching then you should catch them all (exhaustive). A better solution is merely: void f(string s) { try { File_handle fh { s, "r"}; // use fh } catch (const std::exception& e) { printf(stderr, e.what()); } } That's all you need. But actually this code is also bad because this function f() shouldn't have a try/catch in it that prints an error message. That's a job for a function (possibly main()) further up the call stack.