Catching exception

I'm throwing exceptions that seem impossible to catch... see this code:

Code:

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#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
        cout << "Starting." << endl;

        try
        {
                cout << "In a hopeless situation." << endl;
                throw;
        }
        catch(...)
        {
                cout << "What a miserable little existance..." << endl;
        }

        cout << "My life as a program ends now." << endl;

        return 0;
}

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Gives me:

Code:

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Starting.
In a hopeless situation.

abnormal program termination

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Why? I thought catch(...) caught any exception thrown? Why miss a blank one? If I replace my throw; with throw 1; or anything else (provide something to be thrown) it will catch. I'm new to exceptions... but this code is almost directly off the flipcode tutorial. Where have I gone wrong?

The problem is that a throw without any operand rethrows the exception. As such you can only use that type of throw inside a catch statement

throw; doesn't throw a blank exception. It will re-throw the current exception and thus should be used only within a catch block. (Of course, it could be in a function that is called from within a catch block, so the compiler will have a hard time warning you against incorrect usage.)
Re-throwing a non-existent exception causes terminate() to be called. (See 15.1.7 in the C++ standard.) The default behaviour of terminate() (i.e. when no different handler was installed using set_terminate()) is to call abort() in turn, which immediately kills the program.

I see... as far as I can the tell, the flipcode article must've been incorrent. Regardless, I understand now. Thanks for the help!

You mean this?

Quote:

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Empty Throws

So, we can see now how powerful and useful this "new" method is. A try-catch block can contain another try-catch block, and this block can throw anything, too, which will be caught by the outer catch if there is no corresponding inner catch, or the catch throws something. One thing I have neglected to mention is that throw need not even have anything after it:

Code:

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try
{
  throw;
}
catch(...)
{
  cout << "Caught exception!" << endl;
}

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This could be used in extreme situations where you don't even care what was thrown.

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You're right, it's wrong. (The catch statement's right, though. You actually can have a catch that looks like that, which will catch any exception.)