Collateral Exceptions, Throwable vs Exception

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 08/19/2010 10:14 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> The .next property is to allow chaining. However, it may be that the
>> current behavior of toString is incorrect, or that a new function
>> should be added that only returns a string describing the current
>> exception and not the entire chain.
>>
>
> IMO, it should be the opposite. I noticed the current behavior the other
> day and was surprised. I would expect toString to return only the
> message from the Throwable I called it on. A concatenated string of
> messages from the whole chain would be the special case to be separated
> into a convenience function. Then again, I don't see the convenience
> function being necessary, as it's trivial to roll your own for the cases
> when you want it -- which is what I was doing when I discovered the
> current behavior and, like Andrej, was confronted by a long list of
> exception messages.

My opinion: Throwable should have a @property called printingDepth or 
something. It should default to e.g. 3 (or conservatively at 1) and 
limit the number of exceptions in a chain formatted in toString().

Andrei