Are there any guidelines for formatting exception messages? In particular, I'm interested in the case when the exception message is a (clipped) sentence. Is it supposed to start with a capital letter?
If the message refers to a parameter name, the spelling should reflect the name exactly, of course. There seems to be a slight bias towards capitalization, based on a few greps. Consider this: $ LC_ALL=C grep -r 'Exception("[A-Z][^" ]*ing ' src/*/share/classes/ | wc -l 159 $ LC_ALL=C grep -r 'Exception("[a-z][^" ]*ing ' src/*/share/classes/ | wc -l 73