Try-catch: is this acceptable practice?

Question

We have received Java code from a software supplier. It contains a lot of try-catch blocks with nothing in the catch part. They\'re all over the pl

Answer 1

It's not the best:

• It hides evidence of the exception so debugging is harder

• It may cause features to fail silently

• It suggests that the author might actually have wanted to handle the exception but never got around to it

So, there may be cases where this is OK, such as an exception that really is of no consequence (the case that comes to mind is Python's mkdirs, which throws an exception if the directory already exists), but usually, it's not so great.