You didn't ask what's best for them. You asked what you should use, without giving any information what kind of failures you wanted to signal.

Plagiarize the code of others, I say

That's about the worst you can do. It's the fast way to make a very bad coder out of you. It's important to understand what you are doing. Just asking what you should do, and blindly copying that if you would have gotten an unambigious answer is very, very bad.

-- Abigail