I’m not sure if this is a duplicate but if it is please feel free to close this.
Background:
I have a timer component for a game i’m writing that supports Stop and Pause methods. The non-critical error cases in question are doing things like calling Pause when in the timer is already paused, this is not fatal but it’s not going to cause the change in state implied by the method name
Questions:
1. How does one generally indicate a non-fatal but abnormal condition?
2. Should I actually be throwing an exception in these cases? I think it’s a little heavy-handed considering calling Pause when paused wont do any harm
3. Am I over-thinking this
UPDATE:
Based on the responses and comments here is the statergy I have chosen to take:
In development builds an exception will occur because I consider these bugs and I’d like to catch them and correct them. I can’t justify an exception in a release build because these bugs don’t corrupt the game state, and I don’t think users of the application would appreciate the loss of their hard earned score because I failed to code properly
Thanks for all your responses, this has been very educational for me.
I think your fine to just ignore the call if the timer is already paused. Assuming the method is called Pause() then the client only requires that after the method call that the timer is paused, and exceptions should only be thrown if it won’t be; the method doesn’t imply any requirement on the current state of the timer.
On the other hand if the method was called ChangeTimerFromRunningToPaused() then that implies that it is only valid to call this on a running timer. Under these circumstances I would expect it to throw an exception informing the client that the timer is not in a valid state to process this method call.