Garbage collection makes it more practical to return good error messages

Elsewhere I have discussed how I buy into Andrei Alexandresciu and D's contention that throwing C++ style exceptions is the best way to signal errors, since a programmer cannot accidentally or deliberately forget to handle an error.  My preference is to throw generic string error messages, unless I am in a high reliability situation where errors will be parsed and try to be cured, since you can then at least provide a context,. or stack, of error messages.

But... languages with garbage collection do remove one objection to signalling errors by a return code.  One problem with return codes is that they are so cryptic.  Integers.  Ugh.   But if you can construct a meaningful string and return that, then the user at least has the option of printing a meaningful message.

     e.g.

             FUNCTION foo(int bar, char* file) RETURNS char* error_msg;

             if( char* error_msg = foo(42,"bazz") ) {
                     std::cerr << "call to foo got error message: " << error_msg << "\n";
             }

      versus

             foo(42,"bazz");    /// error code is ignored

At least with GC this pattern does not cause a memory leak.

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I still prefer throwing C++ style exceptions, though.