Exception programming difficult

[Marco Leise]

I read both articles and while Bruce Eckel's text read a bit like repeated "swallow exception" to "avoid reams of code" I found the interview insightful. Both aren't entirely negative on checked exceptions and Hejlsberg actually wants them:

  [Anders Hejlsberg]: "And so, when you take all of these issues, to me it just seems more thinking is needed before we put some kind of checked exceptions mechanism in place for C#. But that said, there's certainly tremendous value in knowing what exceptions can get thrown, and having some sort of tool that checks."

The arguments against the Java model were:

1) The programmer, annoyed by the compiler, swallows exceptions with empty catch clauses and forgets about them.

I think _if_ the intention is to get back to it later, you can always write "// TODO: handle the missing icon, by loading a stock icon from the OS". On the other hand, if you just don't want to declare the thrown exception, then this is wrong thinking in my opinion. Usually when I am in this situation in Java it makes me think about the error handling: Can this error be handled gracefully? If so, right here or should it bubble up? Where is the right level to handle it? At the end of this process I have the positive feeling that I got the error handling right.

2) Versioning; a change in a function may add a thrown exception, breaking client code. Often those clients want to ignore any exceptions (and pass them on).

Ok, accepted. The client code would have to change its "throws" list for no perceivable benefit.

3) Declaring the thrown exception doesn't scale well when you call into multiple subsystems that each throw different exceptions, where you would end up declaring dozens of thrown exceptions.

I frankly have to say that I never worked on that big projects, that I had to declare 40 thrown exceptions. And the question may be asked if you should just wrap the exception into another at that point, because you obviously reached a granularity at which the finer details of the sub system failures have become secondary.


So does it all boil down to the potentially long and cascading list of "throws"?
This is not a first grade language issue, I realize that. It's just when you come across it and find yourself documenting the thrown exceptions in DDoc where they aren't checked or anything, it cries for a solution. The solution current languages take seems to be "let the exceptions slip through, more often than not you don't handle them anyway".
How can we reap all the benefits, but avoid the manual listing of all thrown exceptions?

-- 
Marco