...one of the most highly
regarded and expertly designed C++ library projects in the
world.
— Herb Sutter and Andrei
Alexandrescu, C++
Coding Standards
Safe Numerics |
If a divide by zero error occurs in a program, it's detected by hardware. The way this manifests itself to the program can and will depend upon
data type - int, float, etc
setting of compile time command line switches
invocation of some configuration functions which convert these hardware events into C++ exceptions
It's not all that clear how one would detect and recover from a divide by zero error in a simple portable way. Usually, users just ignore the issue which usually results in immediate program termination when this situation occurs.
This library will detect divide by zero errors before the operation is invoked. Any errors of this nature are handled according to the ErrorPolicy selected by the library user.
#include <stdexcept> #include <iostream> #include <boost/safe_numerics/safe_integer.hpp> int main(int, const char *[]){ // problem: cannot recover from arithmetic errors std::cout << "example 7: "; std::cout << "cannot recover from arithmetic errors" << std::endl; std::cout << "Not using safe numerics" << std::endl; try{ int x = 1; int y = 0; // can't do this as it will crash the program with no // opportunity for recovery - comment out for example //std::cout << x / y; std::cout << "error NOT detectable!" << std::endl; } catch(std::exception){ std::cout << "error detected!" << std::endl; } // solution: replace int with safe<int> std::cout << "Using safe numerics" << std::endl; try{ using namespace boost::safe_numerics; safe<int> x = 1; safe<int> y = 0; std::cout << x / y; std::cout << " error NOT detected!" << std::endl; } catch(std::exception & e){ std::cout << "error detected:" << e.what() << std::endl; } return 0; }
example 7: cannot recover from arithmetic errors Not using safe numerics error NOT detectable! Using safe numerics error detected:divide by zero: domain error