9 There Must Be Exceptions
“Why not make exceptions the rule when exceptions prove the rule?”—Georg-Wilhelm Exler
Program errors are inevitable: Inputs could be wrong, files could disappear, and network connections could collapse. A special challenge is presented by unexpected errors, but Java offers the elegant technique to catch exceptions, so that programs can rescue themselves from almost any situation.
In early programming languages, no way existed for routines to indicate a failure except via a return value—in the C programming language, this limitation is still the case today. Two problems arise with this reliance on return values:
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The error code is often a “magic” value like -1, NULL , or 0 . However, a zero can also indicate correctness, ...
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