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Java
book

Java

by Rheinwerk Publishing, Inc, Christian Ullenboom
June 2025
Intermediate to advanced
1129 pages
53h
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Java

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:

  • The error code is often a “magic” value like -1, NULL , or 0 . However, a zero can also indicate correctness, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781806118434