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From: Eric Sosman <esosman@comcast-dot-net.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer
Subject: Re: Interface with implied Constructor
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 16:58:54 -0400
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On 7/21/2013 3:18 PM, Arved Sandstrom wrote:
> On 07/20/2013 04:12 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> [ SNIP ]
>
>> This is a result of my dislike of using Exceptions to signal anything
>> except a fatal error and may well be a hangover from writing a lot of C
>> in the past.
>
> You probably know this, in fact I'm sure you do, but in OOP exceptions
> are like 95% of the time used for everything but fatal errors. Well,
> maybe 98 or 99 percent of the time.

     (Eighty-seven point three percent of cited statistics are
plucked out of thin air.  ;-)

     One problem is that "fatal" is ill-defined.  Is an NPE
"fatal?"  Quite often it is, but sometimes the application
is prepared to cope with it -- For example, think of some
code throwing NPE while being managed by an IDE's debugger,
of think of a servlet throwing NPE without taking down the
entire Web container.

     Somewhere toward the other end of the spectrum, is a
NumberFormatException "benign?"  Maybe, if the application
can protest and prompt for another number.  Or maybe not,
if the string came from a configuration file and there's
nobody to respond to a prompt.

     The "seriousness" of an exception is not a function of
the exception itself, but of the code that catches (or fails
to catch) it.

-- 
Eric Sosman
esosman@comcast-dot-net.invalid