Re: Java language and library suggestions

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:08:24 -0400
Message-ID:
<4a636f27$0$48237$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>
Tomas Mikula wrote:

On Jul 19, 6:15 pm, Arne Vajh?j <a...@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

Tomas Mikula wrote:

On Jul 19, 4:42 pm, Arne Vajh?j <a...@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

Tomas Mikula wrote:

On Jul 19, 3:42 pm, Arne Vajh?j <a...@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

Tom Anderson wrote:

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Lew wrote:

Tomas Mikula wrote:

Anyway there are still many cases when one could use safely it to get
more readable code.

Arne Vajh?j wrote:

It can happen, but I don't think it occur frequently enough to
justify a feature that is so easy to misuse.

Tomas Mikula wrote:

I disagree again. Almost everything can be misused. If someone feels
like their code never throws an exception, they could tend to write an
empty exception handler:
try {
   // code that is incorrectly assumed not to throw any exception
} catch(Exception e) { }
If the Exception can actually be thrown and should be handled, this is
very bad.
I guess that the following would be a much better (although still bad)
solution in this case.
@safe
// code that is incorrectly assumed not to throw any exception
So even if it's going to be misused, it could eventually restrain from
worse things.

"could" != "would".
The proposed language feature would be a change to the language that
would be easy to misuse, might just possibly (if you're right) help
ever-so-slightly in some corner cases, in order to save a little bit
of typing. It doesn't seem like a good tradeoff. Just write the damn
exception handler and quit complaining.

This *is* an exception handler! It's shorthand for:
try {
    STATEMENT
}
catch (EXCEPTION e) {
    throw new AssertionError(e);
}
How is that not an exception handler?

It is an exception handler.
But it is converting the exception that the designer of the API
being called consider a real possibility to an exception that should
never happen by the designer of the calling code.

The designer of the API may as well state that the declared exception
will only be thrown under certain circumstances. If I avoided these
circumstances, then the exception won't be thrown. I will provide an
example:
class WriterEncoder {
   public WriterEncoder(Writer w);
   /** @throws IOException if and only if the write() methods of
underlying Writer throw an exception. */
   public void writeEncoded(MyClass obj) throws IOException;
}
Now if I construct the WriterEncoder with StringWriter which does not
throw IOException on write, I can be sure that
WriterEncoder.writeEncoded() won't throw IOException either.

Yes.
But it is very bad code.
The safe construct is relying on knowledge about implementation
of both the calling and the called code instead of just relying
on the exposed API's.

So what would be your solution? The task is (continuing on the above
example) to write a method for which it does not make sense to throw
an IOException. Yet it is advantageous to use WriterEncoder with
StringWriter from within this method. The best solution I can think of
is
try {
   encoder.writeEncoded(obj);
} catch(IOException e) {
   throw new AssertionError(e);
}
which is exactly what could be written more concisely with @safe.

I would either catch the exception and do something to handle
the situation properly


From the beginning I'm talking about situations when throwing an error
is the most proper handling of the situation.


Our whole point is that the number of situations where usage
of this construct makes sense is too small to justify a language
change.

or let the exception bubble to where it
could be handled properly.


As I noted in the example, bubbling of the exception would be a
logical error - getting an IOException from a method that by
definition does not do any I/O.


No.

It calls an API that declares to throw an IOException.

Maybe it is not possible in current implementation.

But it may be possible in 5 or 10 years.

Which is why that it is good to program to the contract
and not to ones knowledge about the implementation.

Arne

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