Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] Java is fun!

[Dustin Sallings]

On Wednesday, Oct 22, 2003, at 13:49 US/Pacific, address@hidden wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 11:21:07AM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> ...
> > otherwise, what about the unfortunate caller who has code:
> >
> >                 try {
> >                   List lines=Reader.getLinesOfFile(fileName);
> >                   Answer a=Parser.parseLines(lines);
> >                 } catch (IOException e) {
> >                   ...
> >                 } catch (ParserException e) {
> >                   ...
> >                 }
> > Hey, who _really_ raised that ParserException?
>
> Stop bashing java, you obviously have no idea what you are talking 
> about
> and are basically making a fool of yourself; your expertise is 
> somewhere
> else; take the ideas you like and walk away.

        I think a nicer and more accurate answer is something like this:

	If it really makes a difference to you (and if it did, you might 
structure differently), you ask the exception for its stack trace, 
which will tell you all of the stack frames leading up to the exception 
that occurred.  This will include the call to either getLinesOfFile or 
parseLines, what they called, what they called, etc... and all of the 
stuff in the other direction up to the start of the thread.

	Tom is bringing up some valid theoretical points, but I don't think 
they come up very often in practice.

	I think there are lessons to be learned here for everyone.  Some 
things may not work quite as well as some people expect in certain 
cases, nor as poorly as others expect.  I still believe that the 
failures that have been cited so far will, at worst, provide misleading 
error messages when a failure occurs rather than causing the types of 
problems we've seen in various persistent applications written in C 
over the years.

--
Dustin Sallings