I've got a particularly ornery piece of network code. I'm using asio but that really doesn't matter for this question. I assume there is no way to unbind a socket other than closing it. The problem is that open(), bind(), and listen() can all throw a system_error. So I handled the code with a simple try/catch. The code as written in broken.

using namespace boost::asio;

class Thing
{
public:

   ip::tcp::endpoint m_address;

   ip::tcp::acceptor m_acceptor;

   /// connect should handle all of its exceptions internally.
   bool connect()
   {
      try
      {
         m_acceptor.open( m_address.protocol() );
         m_acceptor.set_option( tcp::acceptor::reuse_address(true) );

         m_acceptor.bind( m_address );
         m_acceptor.listen();

         m_acceptor.async_accept( /*stuff*/ );
      }
      catch( const boost::system::system_error& error )
      {
         assert(acceptor.is_open());
         m_acceptor.close();
         return false;
      }
      return true;
   }

   /// don't call disconnect unless connect previously succeeded.
   void disconnect()
   {
      // other stuff needed to disconnect is ommited
      m_acceptor.close();
   }
};

The error is if the socket fails to connect it will try to close it in the catch block and throw another system_error about closing an acceptor that has never been opened.

One solution is to add an if( acceptor.is_open() ) in the catch block but that tastes wrong. Kinda like mixing C-style error checking with c++ exceptions. If I where to go that route, I may as well use the non-throwing version of open().

boost::system::error_code error;
acceptor.open( address.protocol, error );
if( ! error )
{
    try
    {
       acceptor.set_option( tcp::acceptor::reuse_address(true) );

       acceptor.bind( address );
       acceptor.listen();

       acceptor.async_accept( /*stuff*/ );
    }
    catch( const boost::system::system_error& error )
    {
       assert(acceptor.is_open());
       acceptor.close();
       return false;
    }
}
return !error;

Is there an elegant way to handle these possible exceptions using RAII and try/catch blocks?

Am I just wrong headed in trying to avoid if( error condition ) style error handling when using exceptions?