It's important to keep a balanced view of exception specifications. They provide excellent documentation on the kinds of exceptions a function is expected to throw, and for situations in which violating an exception specification is so dire as to justify immediate program termination, they offer that behavior by default. At the same time, they are only partly checked by compilers and they are easy to violate inadvertently. Furthermore, they can prevent high-level exception handlers from dealing with unexpected exceptions, even when they know how to. That being the case, exception specifications are a tool to be applied judiciously. Before adding them to your functions, consider whether the behavior they impart to your software is really the behavior you want.