The Daily WTF

“Don’t use exception handling for normal flow control,” is generally good advice. But Andy‘s lead had a PhD in computer science, and with that kind of education, wasn’t about to let good advice or best practices tell them what to do. That’s why, when they needed to validate inputs, they wrote code C# like this:

public static bool IsDecimal(string theValue) { try { Convert.ToDouble(theValue); return true; } catch { return false; } }

They attempt to convert, and if they succeed, great, return true. If they fail, an exception gets caught, and they return false. What could be simpler?

Well, using the built in TryParse function would be simpler. Despite its name, actually avoids throwing an exception, even internally, because exceptions are expensive in .NET. And it is already implemented, so you don’t have to do this.

Also, Decimal is a type in C#- a 16-byte floating point

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