Question

I have dispute with my friend.

He said me that this code:

method SetBalance(balance) {
    if (balance > 0) {
        this.balance = balance;
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

is better then this:

method SetBalance(balance) {
    if (balance < 0) {
        throw new InvalidArgumentException("Balance couldn't be negative")
    }
    this.balance = balance; 
}

My question is: “Which approach is better for validation?” and why?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Ah. Return status versus exception.

I prefer throwing exceptions, because you can’t really ignore an exception. The program either crashes, or you have to explicitly catch and handle it.

You can just ignore a return status.

Besides, isn’t this the reason exceptions exist in modern programming? To deal with, well… exceptions (balance <= 0, something that shouldn’t happen).