When to use exceptions in Java (example)

Question

I know that this would be bad practice although I know that I would not be able to explain why.

int [] intArr = ...
...
try{
   int i = 0;
   while(true){
         


        

Answer 1

You are right: exceptions are meant for, ehm, exceptional cases. Using them for controlling normal control flow is not only obscuring the intent of the code (which would be enough to disqualify it already), but also is much slower, since throwing and catching exceptions is costly.

The standard idiom (in Java5 and above) is using a foreach loop:

for (int i : intArr) {
  System.out.println(i);
}