Re: Exception Names
"Joshua Cranmer" <Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid> wrote in message
news:gqonlg$qfl$1@news-int2.gatech.edu...
Karl Uppiano wrote:
Not so much a naming thing, but I kinda wish InterruptedException was a
runtime exception instead of a checked exception. IMHO, there may be more
incorrect code written to handle InterruptedException than all of the
others combined. More often than not, it seems when someone wants to
wait, they catch and "eat" the InterruptedException, often resuming in
some loop, when someone much higher up wanted to interrupt the wait and
regain control of the thread.
Programmer stupidity is not a good reason to make a checked exception a
runtime exception. The entire point of checked exceptions it that it
forces programmers to deal with potentially dangerous situations in some
manner; if programmers choose to deal with them idiotically, they're just
opening themselves up to a world of hurt.
If someone is eating InterruptedExceptions, he or she probably doesn't
know what that exception means. In that case, there are likely much larger
multithreading bugs in the same code.
Ok, but all engineering is a compromise. IME, threads are rarely
interrupted, but every wait requires a handler for the InterruptedException.
It is the frequency of the need to wait vs. the infrequency of actually
encountering the InterruptedException that I think makes it a better
candidate for a runtime exception. I believe this was the rationale for
making some other exception types unchecked. As it is, InterruptedException
is usually more of an annoyance, and programmers just eat it to shut up the
compiler. I know it isn't the right thing to do, but it gets done. I have
seen it done all too often. If it were a runtime exception, it would just
fly out to the run method. I usually have a guard handler up there for
unexpected exceptions like this, where I generally shut down gracefully.
Runtime exceptions would get caught there. If I'm really doing something in
my design that involves interrupting threads, I could catch it without it
having to be a checked exception.
I'm not being frivolous here. This is the only exception that I have
encountered so far that I think would have been better classified as a
runtime exception.
When you need to wait, and must now handle the InterruptedException, what do
you do with it?