Yes, of course, it should always be checked. However, in practice, I've never seen it done. :-) Well, I have done it myself a couple of times, but I'm particularly anal about these kinds of things. I would do it like this, probably: object = MyObject() IF ~Obj_Valid(object) THEN RETURN I would rely on the error handling in the object INIT method to supply the reason for the failure.

Thanks, David. This makes sense. However, what's the purpose then of the return value? Wim

I agree with David. It's rare in code that I've seen or written to explicitly check the return state of an OBJ_NEW, unless you have a reason to suspect the creation may fail, for example if the initialization of the object uses up system resources. The main use case for checking a return that you'll see is in the ::Init of a class that subclasses from one or more other classes. This pattern is common throughout the IDL /lib classes. function mysubclass::init, _ref_extra = extra if (~self->mysuperclass::init(_extra = extra)) then return, 0 ... return, 1 end If you're something less than completely antisocial, you may also consider adding a CATCH block to your class' Init to alleviate the potential for leaking system resources, then return a 0.