Why do Java people frequently consume exceptions silently?

Question

I never did any serious Java coding before, but I learned the syntax, libraries, and concepts based on my existing skills (Delphi & C#). One thing I hardly understand i

Answer 1

You should see this very often if the programmer does his job right. Ignoring Exception is a bad, bad practice! But there are some reasons why some might do this and the more apporiate solutions:

• "This wont happen!" Sure, sometime you "know" that this Exception won't happen, but its still more appropiate to rethrow a runtime exception whith the occoured Exception as "cause" instead of just ignoring it. I bet it will occour sometime in the future. ;-)

• Prototyping Code If you're just typing your stuff down to see if it works out you might want to ignore all Exceptions that might occour. This is the only case i do some lazy catch(Throwable). But if the code will turn out into something useful, i include proper exception handling.

• "I dont know what to do!" I saw much code, especially library code, which swallows occouring exceptions because in this layer of the application no proper handling can be done. DONT DO THIS! Just rethrow the exception (either by adding a throws clause in the method signature or wrapping the exception into a library specific one).