When should Throwable be used instead of new Exception?

Question

Given: Throwable is Exception\'s superclass.

When I read texts on writing your own \'exceptions\', I see examples of Throwable

Answer 1

You should not really catch an exception and throw a new one as general as "new Exception".

Instead, if you wish to bubble up the exception just do the following:

try {
    // Do some stuff here
}
catch (DivideByZeroException e) {
    System.out.println("Can't divide by Zero!"); 
} 
catch (IndexOutOfRangeException e) { 
    // catch the exception 
    System.out.println("No matching element found.");
}
catch (Throwable e) {
    throw e; // rethrow the exception/error that occurred
}

It is not good practise, I believe, to catch an exception and throw a new exception instead of the one that was raised to your code block, unless you raise a useful custom exception that provides enough context to elude to the cause of the original exception.