Re: Good practice or not to close the file before System.exit(1)?

From:

Lew <noone@lewscanon.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.help

Date:

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 09:54:40 -0400

Message-ID:

<iouln5$imi$1@news.albasani.net>

Patricia Shanahan wrote:

Lew wrote:

Patricia Shanahan wrote:

markspace wrote:

Patricia Shanahan wrote:

There is no problem using exceptions inside main, as long as you catch
them, so that they don't get thrown from main.

During development, throwing exceptions from main is fine because it
gives the developer the most about of useful information.

Yes, I was over-simplifying a bit.

I disagree. Throwing exceptions from main() provides no benefit that
logging doesn't provide better.

The benefit is simplicity.

I often write short test programs, for example when looking into a
newsgroup question, for which I'm the only user and that will only be
run once. Just sticking "throws Exception" on main is simpler than
catching exceptions and logging them.

I repeat the part that you omitted, which changes the sense of the comment you
cited,

I'm using "main()" as a catch-all term for the top business layer of an application,
be it a Java application, applet, web app, service or whatever.
The observable behavior must conform to the problem domain being solved by the application.
Emitting implementation-level messages at the business-domain level is inappropriate
unless the business domain *is* the implementation.

You speak of the case where the implementation is the domain, which I
explicitly called out as a case where I agree that exceptions can be useful in
the "main". Thanks for elucidating that point.

--
Lew
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Friz.jpg