To my mind, the fundamental question should be whether one would expect that the caller would want to continue normal program flow if a condition occurs. If you don't know, either have separate doSomething and trySomething methods, where the former returns an error and the latter does not, or have a routine that accepts a parameter to indicate whether an exception should be thrown if it fails). Consider a class to send commands to a remote system and report responses. Certain commands (e.g. restart) will cause the remote system to send a response but then be non-responsive for a certain length of time. It is thus useful to be able to send a "ping" command and find out whether the remote system responds in a reasonable length of time without having to throw an exception if it doesn't (the caller would probably expect that the first few "ping" attempts would fail, but one would eventually work). On the other hand, if one has a sequence of commands like:

  exchange_command("open tempfile");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("write tempfile data {whatever}");
  exchange_command("close tempfile");
  exchange_command("copy tempfile to realfile");

人们会希望任何操作的失败都能中止整个序列。虽然可以检查每个操作以确保操作成功，但如果命令失败，让exchange_command()例程抛出异常会更有帮助。

实际上，在上面的场景中，有一个参数来选择一些失败处理模式可能会有所帮助:从不抛出异常，仅为通信错误抛出异常，或者在命令没有返回“成功”指示的任何情况下抛出异常。

异常类就像“正常”类。当一个新类“是”一个不同类型的对象，具有不同的字段和不同的操作时，您可以创建一个新类。

As a rule of thumb, you should try balance between the number of exceptions and the granularity of the exceptions. If your method throws more than 4-5 different exceptions, you can probably merge some of them into more "general" exceptions, (e.g. in your case "AuthenticationFailedException"), and using the exception message to detail what went wrong. Unless your code handles each of them differently, you needn't creates many exception classes. And if it does, may you should just return an enum with the error that occured. It's a bit cleaner this way.

首先，如果API的用户对特定的、细粒度的故障不感兴趣，那么为他们设置特定的异常就没有任何价值。

由于通常不可能知道什么可能对用户有用，一个更好的方法是有特定的异常，但确保它们继承自一个公共类(例如，std::exception或其在c++中的派生类)。这允许您的客户端捕获特定的异常(如果他们愿意的话)，或者捕获更一般的异常(如果他们不关心的话)。

我想说的是，如果发生了意想不到的行为，应该抛出异常。

比如试图更新或删除一个不存在的实体。它应该在异常可以处理并且有意义的地方被捕获。如果要以另一种方式继续工作，请在Api级别上添加日志记录或返回特定的结果。

如果您期望某些事情是这样的，那么您应该构建代码来检查并确保它是正确的。

我想说，对于什么时候使用异常并没有硬性规定。然而，使用或不使用它们有很好的理由:

使用异常的原因:

The code flow for the common case is clearer Can return complex error information as an object (although this can also be achieved using error "out" parameter passed by reference) Languages generally provide some facility for managing tidy cleanup in the event of the exception (try/finally in Java, using in C#, RAII in C++) In the event no exception is thrown, execution can sometimes be faster than checking return codes In Java, checked exceptions must be declared or caught (although this can be a reason against)

不使用异常的原因:

Sometimes it's overkill if the error handling is simple If exceptions are not documented or declared, they may be uncaught by calling code, which may be worse than if the the calling code just ignored a return code (application exit vs silent failure - which is worse may depend on the scenario) In C++, code that uses exceptions must be exception safe (even if you don't throw or catch them, but call a throwing function indirectly) In C++, it is hard to tell when a function might throw, therefore you must be paranoid about exception safety if you use them Throwing and catching exceptions is generally significantly more expensive compared to checking a return flag

一般来说，我更倾向于在Java中使用异常，而不是在c++或c#中，因为我认为异常，无论是否声明，都是函数正式接口的基本组成部分，因为更改异常保证可能会破坏调用代码。在Java IMO中使用它们的最大优势是，您知道调用者必须处理异常，这提高了正确行为的机会。

正因为如此，在任何语言中，我总是从一个公共类派生一层代码或API中的所有异常，这样调用的代码就总能保证捕获所有异常。另外，我认为在编写API或库时抛出特定于实现的异常类是不好的(即从较低的层包装异常，以便调用者接收到的异常在您的接口上下文中是可以理解的)。

注意，Java区分了一般异常和运行时异常，因为后者不需要声明。我只会使用运行时异常类，当您知道错误是由程序中的错误导致的。

我个人的指导方针是:当发现当前代码块的基本假设为假时抛出异常。

例1:假设我有一个函数，它应该检查任意类，如果该类继承自List<>，则返回true。这个函数问一个问题:“这个对象是List的后代吗?”这个函数永远不会抛出异常，因为它的操作中没有灰色地带——每个单独的类要么继承了List<>，要么继承了List<>，所以答案总是“是”或“否”。

Example 2: say I have another function which examines a List<> and returns true if its length is more than 50, and false if the length is less. This function asks the question, "Does this list have more than 50 items?" But this question makes an assumption - it assumes that the object it is given is a list. If I hand it a NULL, then that assumption is false. In that case, if the function returns either true or false, then it is breaking its own rules. The function cannot return anything and claim that it answered the question correctly. So it doesn't return - it throws an exception.

这与“负载问题”逻辑谬误相当。每个函数都问一个问题。如果给出的输入使该问题成为谬误，则抛出异常。对于返回void的函数，这条线很难画出来，但底线是:如果函数对其输入的假设违反了，它应该抛出异常，而不是正常返回。

这个等式的另一方面是:如果你发现你的函数经常抛出异常，那么你可能需要改进它们的假设。