exit() call inside a function which should return a reference

Question

In a library I have a function which searches for a key in a database and return a non-const reference to an object. I want to handle the case in which the key is not found,

Answer 1

Exceptions

This is a common situation in many programs. To overcome this, Exceptions are used.

• To handle unexpected situations, new Exceptions are created and "thrown" from the code.
• Then they have to be "caught" by the program calling the function.

You can read more about exceptions here.

Hope this helps.