I strongly recommend the advice on Krzysztof’s blog and would note that in your case you seem to be trying to deal with what he calls Usage Errors.
In this case what is required is not a new type to indicate it but a better error message about what caused it. As such a helper function to either:
- generate the textual string to place into the exception
- generate the whole exception and message
Is what is required.
Approach 1 is clearer, but may lead to a little more verbose usage, 2 is the opposite, trading a terser syntax for less clarity.
Note that the functions must be extremely safe (they should never, ever cause an unrelated exception themselves) and not force the provision of data that is optional in certain reasonable uses.
By using either of these approaches you make it easier to internationalise the error message later if required.
A stack trace at a minimum gives you the function, and possibly the line number, thus you should focus on supplying information that is not easy to work out from that.