Pitfall: the lost exception
Unfortunately, there’s a flaw in Java’s exception implementation. Although exceptions are an indication of a crisis in your program and should never be ignored, it’s possible for an exception to simply be lost. This happens with a particular configuration using a finally clause:
//: c09:LostMessage.java
// How an exception can be lost.
// {ThrowsException}
import com.bruceeckel.simpletest.*;
class VeryImportantException extends Exception {
public String toString() {
return "A very important exception!";
}
}
class HoHumException extends Exception {
public String toString() {
return "A trivial exception";
}
}
public class LostMessage {
private static Test monitor = new Test();
void f() throws VeryImportantException {
throw new VeryImportantException();
}
void dispose() throws HoHumException {
throw new HoHumException();
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
LostMessage lm = new LostMessage();
try {
lm.f();
} finally {
lm.dispose();
}
monitor.expect(new String[] {
"Exception in thread \"main\" A trivial exception",
"\tat LostMessage.dispose(LostMessage.java:24)",
"\tat LostMessage.main(LostMessage.java:31)"
}); }
} ///:~
You can see that there’s no evidence of the VeryImportantException, which is simply replaced by the HoHumException in the finally clause. This is a rather serious pitfall, since it means that an exception can be completely lost, and in a far more subtle and difficult-to-detect fashion than the preceding example. In contrast, C++ treats the situation in which a second exception is thrown before the first one is handled as a dire programming error. Perhaps a future version of Java will repair this problem (on the other hand, you will typically wrap any method that throws an exception, such as dispose( ), inside a try-catch clause).
