On Sunday, 25 June 2017 at 18:00:46 UTC, Eugene Wissner wrote:
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
As suggested by the post in above link I searched for "Walter checked exceptions". I found a few posts where Walter points to an article written by Bruce Eckel. Though the link to Eckel's article no longer works, I am familiar with Eckel's arguments, and I even exchanged emails with Eckel back in 2003 on this topic. Suffice to say I believe Eckel is wrong on this topic.
Bruce Eckel argues that checked exceptions forces you to write bad code (catch Exception base class) and Walter mentions this. Eckel is wrong. The opposite is true. Lack of checked exceptions forces you to catch Exception base class in order to prevent crashes. If you know what exceptions are possible then you can catch just those exceptions. If you don't know then you have to rely on testing to find out what exceptions are possible but you will never get an exhaustive list through testing since tests can never be 100% comprehensive for non-trivial programs. So you end up catching Exception base class, thus swallowing exceptions. I have seen lots of large code bases in C# and Java written by very good developers, and I can tell you that experience has proven that "catch (Exception)" is common in C# code bases and rarely seen in Java code bases.
