Hijacking

[Chris Nicholson-Sauls]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Rioshin an'Harthen" <rharth75 at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:f974u9$9k1$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> "Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> kirjoitti viestissä 
>> news:f95leh$hn4$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> It might be one of those things like exception specifications where 
>>> everyone says it's a good idea but guiltily hate in secret <g>.
>> Exception specification *is* a good idea. Although I do hate it - try to 
>> remember what a specific method may throw when you write your code, 
>> especially if the error is ambiguous like "Unhandled exception" it's 
>> really irritating - but I hate unspecified exceptions even more, as the 
>> problem then is to even remember to put in the necessary try-catch-finally 
>> blocks.
> 
> Not to start a big big debate on it, but my own personal feeling on that 
> (after having used a fair amount of it) is that the specification of 
> exceptions belongs in generated documentation (whether javadoc-style or as 
> part of the IDE as with "some_function() -> Called By..."). I normally 
> prefer having to explicity specify things (yea, strong-typing fan here ;) ), 
> but personally, I find it overkill in this case. (Not to mention it gave me 
> flashbacks of writing C/C++ headers. j/k ;) ). 
> 
> 

I didn't mind it at first, in that the Java compiler would then let me 
know if I'd missed any potential exceptions...

...but when I noticed I was just adding 'throws A,B,C' to a lot of my 
methods, I decided it wasn't entirely a great thing afterall.  What 
would have been better, I think, would have been to make throws 
specifications /optional/.  A thing libraries should do, but which 
applications should be allowed to quietly "forget" most of the time. 
Java is the language of conventions, after all.

-- Chris Nicholson-Sauls