What's the intended use of IllegalStateException?

Question

This came up in a discussion with a colleague today.

The Javadocs for Java\'s IllegalStateException state that it:

Signals that a method has b

Answer 1

I ran into this with:

try {
    MessageDigest digest = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1");
    ...
} catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e) {
    throw new AssertionError(e);
}

I think it will be impractical for me to throw IllegalStateException here in place of AssertionException even though this falls into the "the Java environment" category.