Introduction to Programming

Some best practices of exception handling

The Java exception handling mechanism was designed to address possible edge cases and unexpected program termination. The two categories of errors were expected to be:

• Recoverable: Those that can be remedied automatically based on the application logic
• Unrecoverable: Those that cannot be corrected automatically and which lead to program termination

The first category of errors was addressed by introducing checked exceptions (descendants of the Exception class), while the second became a realm of unchecked exceptions (descendants of the RuntimeException class).

Unfortunately, such categorization turned out to be not in line with the programming practicalities, especially for the areas of programming ...