CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2009/wiki1b 3 expHandle

Describing the exception handling concepts in various Object Oriented Languages and pointing the nuances of difference in their implementation

Introduction

Exception Handling

Every functionality or use case in any application can have multiple outcomes. Depending on the result of the operation performed we have a happy flow, error flow or exception flow. The exception flow is triggered when some unexpected or unusual flow is initiated. This can be due to failure of external system failure or some unexpected user inputs. This can also be due to bad coding practices followed by the developer. Every language has some support for this kind of exception scenario. Either the exceptions are handled, thrown or initiated in a method. The mechanism differs in different languages, like in some languages like Java the entire cause of exception is made available till the point the exception is interpreted into a response, in languages like C’s atoi (ASCII to Integer) function the response if zero (0) even if the parsing fails, thus making it difficult to distinguish between a correct parsing of 0 or a parsing failure error.

Scope

Here let’s try and understand the way Exception Handling is implemented in various languages and then compare them based on

1) Ease of development

2) Simplicity on understanding

3) Resources freeing up (You will definitely want your code to close/release the file it tried to open or close a db Connection to the pool)

4) Error handling and transporting