When is it OK to catch a RuntimeException

Question

On a recent project I recommended catching a RuntimeException within a test harness code and logging it. The code processes a series of inputs from a database, and I do not

Answer 1

Personally, I've always been told that you want to catch all RuntimeExceptions; however, you also want to do something about the exception, such as running a failsafe or possibly just informing the user that an error occurred.

The last Java project that I worked on had a similar approach, at the very least, we would log the exception so that if a user called complaining about a bug, we could find out exactly what happened and see where the error occurred.

Edit 1: As kdgregory said, catching and ignoring are two different things, generally, people are opposed to the latter :-)