From: Alexey Verkhovsky <alex@...>
Date: 2004-08-29T23:41:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Typos (Was: performance comparison)

On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 17:21, Lothar Scholz wrote:

> I see a huge problem with this in many Java apps where the normal
> reaction is to say: "okay lets throw an exception" but the programmer
> never tries to handle it somewhere else then in the main loop with a
> catch all clause.

I'd say, in any language with exceptions support, handling an exception
where you don't know what to do with it (instead of propagating it up
the stack) is a much more common "shoddy programming technique" than
what you describe. 

Variants of this anti-pattern are "Print stack trace and forget", "Wrap
and re-throw" or even "Throw another exception and forget (losing the
stack trace to the original error)".

In most cases main loop or somewhere quite close to that is precisely
the right place to handle exceptions, provided that "ensure" clause (or
Java "finally") is used judiciously to close things like database
connections and other expensive resources.

Alex