Today I wish to say: "Well, screw that."
I feel like entire generations of coders are growing up not knowing how to deal with error conditions because they're constantly learning from sources that don't acknowledge that network failures occur or that you occasionally receive bad input from the user. (Or if you're a compiler writer, you constantly receive bad input from the user, but I digress.)
So leave it in. If you're writing exception safe code, say which guarantee that your functions give. Check those return values. Go ahead and call GetLastError(). Throw those exceptions and make those assertions.
Despite our best efforts to the contrary, people still are learning programming by imitation. We can't stop that, but we can at least give them good code to imitate.
When you have a few relevant lines of code included interspersed with explanation I'd prefer to keep it short and not have too much error handling code with it [smile]
Jack