Chapter 11. Exceptions

 

If anything can go wrong, it will.

 
 --Finagle’s Law (often incorrectly attributed to Murphy, whose law is rather different—which only goes to show that Finagle was right)

When a program violates the semantic constraints of the Java programming language, the Java virtual machine signals this error to the program as an exception. An example of such a violation is an attempt to index outside the bounds of an array. Some programming languages and their implementations react to such errors by peremptorily terminating the program; other programming languages allow an implementation to react in an arbitrary or unpredictable way. Neither of these approaches is compatible with the design goals of the Java platform: to provide portability ...

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