Catching readable exceptions from std::iostream errors

In none of the recipes in this chapter, we used exceptions to catch errors. While this is certainly possible, working on stream objects without exceptions is already very convenient. If we try to parse in 10 values, but this fails somewhere in the middle, the whole stream object sets itself into a fail state and stops further parsing. This way, we do not run into the danger of parsing variables from the wrong offset in the stream. We can just do the parsing in a conditional, such as if (cin >> foo >> bar >> ...). If this fails, we handle it. It does not appear very advantageous to embrace parsing in a try { ... } catch ... block.

In fact, the C++ I/O stream library already existed before there were exceptions in C++. Exception support was added later, which might be an explanation why they are not a first-class supported feature in the stream library.

In order to use exceptions in the stream library, we must configure...