Re: Ada exceptions. unchecked?

[stephen@dino.dnsalias.com (Stephen J. Bevan)]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:
> Yes, the problem is that the program, or the programmer,
> needs to know what exceptions to handle, but not every
> routine needs to know it. It seems to me that this should
> be accomplished through documentation.

The Java designers decided that, like types, exceptions must be
statically checked by the compiler***.  They presumably did this for
the same reason that they want types statically checked: to catch as
many errors at compile time as possible (i.e. avoid an exception being
thrown for which there is no handler).

It is possible that they went too far with this and that statically
checking exceptions causes more pain than it is worth.  However, if
you ask a Smalltalk or Lisp programmer they'll tell you that
statically checking *types* (as is done in Ada) causes more pain than
it is worth it would be better to use documentation and/or test cases.

*** There is a loophole: RuntimeException (and any subclasses) can be
    thrown without listing it in a method signature.