C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

18.1.5. Exception Class Hierarchies

The standard-library exception classes (§ 5.6.3, p. 197) form the inheritance hierarchy (Chapter 15) as shown in Figure 18.1.

The only operations that the exception types define are the copy constructor, copy-assignment operator, a virtual destructor, and a virtual member named what. The what function returns a const char* that points to a null-terminated character array, and is guaranteed not to throw any exceptions.

The exception, bad_cast, and bad_alloc classes also define a default constructor. The runtime_error and logic_error classes do not have a default constructor but do have constructors that take a C-style character string or a library string argument. Those arguments are intended to give additional ...