“Return an error code. You could decide that only certain parts of a system will handle errors. Other parts will not handle errors locally; they will simply report that an error has been detected and trust that some other routine higher up in the calling hierarchy will handle the error. The specific mechanism for notifying the rest of the system that an error has occurred could be any of the following: Set the value of a status variable Return status as the function's return value Throw an exception by using the language's built-in exception mechanism”