A Philosophy of Software Design

by John Ousterhout

Generating an exception in a situation like this just passes the problem to someone else and adds to the system’s complexity. The exceptions thrown by a class are part of its interface; classes with lots of exceptions have complex interfaces, and they are shallower than classes with fewer exceptions. An exception is a particularly complex element of an interface. It can propagate up through several stack levels before being caught, so it affects not just the method’s caller, but potentially also higher-level callers (and their interfaces). Throwing exceptions is easy; handling them is hard. Thus, the complexity of exceptions comes from the exception handling code. The best way to reduce the complexity damage caused by exception handling is to reduce the number of places where exceptions have to be handled. The rest of this chapter will discuss four techniques for reducing the number of exception handlers.

Exceptions