[Juglist] Structured Exception Handling

[Cory Foy]

As I got involved in the .NET world, one of the things that bugged me 
(among lots of other things) was that classes didn't require you to 
specify or catch exceptions that it created. So even if I wanted to 
specify that my account class could throw an "AccountOverdrawn" error, I 
had no way of decorating the class to make it evident, nor had a way for 
users of my class to be aware or indeed even note that my class could 
throw it.

In my mind this is a limitation of .NET over Java. Someone then directed 
me to an interview by Anders Hejlsberg, the chief architect of C# 
(http://www.artima.com/intv/handcuffs.html). In it both he and Bruce 
Eckel agree that structured exception handling is not a good 
methodology, but the reasons they give left me wanting more.

The basic comments seem to be that programmers are lazy, and if you want 
to have a class that inherits from 10 different classes each with 8 
structured exceptions they can throw, the lazy programmer is just going 
to write "catch (Exception e)" and be done with it. They do raise some 
interesting comments about extensibility and being able to modify base 
classes though.

I've seen some pretty bright minds on this list and am really interested 
in what you all think about exception handling. Is it a good thing or a 
bad thing to be able to force using classes to at least acknowledge 
exceptions?

Cory
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