Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

13.6. Java Exception Hierarchy

All Java exception classes inherit, either directly or indirectly, from class Exception, forming an inheritance hierarchy. Programmers can extend this hierarchy to create their own exception classes.

Figure 13.3 shows a small portion of the inheritance hierarchy for class Throwable (a subclass of Object), which is the superclass of class Exception. Only Throwable objects can be used with the exception-handling mechanism. Class Throwable has two subclasses: Exception and Error. Class Exception and its subclasses—for instance, RuntimeException (package java.lang) and IOException (package java.io)—represent exceptional situations that can occur in a Java program and that can be caught by the application. Class Error ...