Error Handling Strategies

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.

Reducing the number of exception handlers.

Define errors out of existence

Mask exception

eg, TCP package loss

Exception aggregation

eg, rails application level catch

Crash

eg, out of memory

Design special cases out of existence

special cases can result in code that is riddled with if statements. By designing the normal case in a way that automatically handles the special cases without any extra code. eg, text edtor, var no_selection = false; vs selections = ‘’;

Conclusion

With exceptions, as with many other areas in software design, you must determine what is important and what is not important. Things that are not important should be hidden, and the more of them the better. But when something is important, it must be exposed.