title: C++ STL stack question: Why does pop() not throw an exception if the stack is empty?
body: <p>Why does std::stack::pop() not throw an exception if the stack is empty and there is nothing to pop?</p>
  
  <p>(I'm designing a specialized Stack for my own code and would like to know the tradeoffs with this approach (which requires one to manually check if the stack is empty) vs. throwing an exception. </p>
  
  <p>My guess here would be that although C++ supports exception-handling, it comes with a small runtime overhead, and therefore, for maximum performance, the decision was made not to throw an exception in std::stack::pop).</p>