Essentially, they should never be used at all. If you're going to have an unrecoverable error, it's trivial to design the system to exit without using exceptions anyway.

Probably the most useful side effect of exceptions is printing the stack trace, and that's not something where the overhead (both performance wise, and logical complexity wise) of exceptions is needed. And you should really be doing logging rather than relying on cryptic exception traces.

The one theoretical case where exceptions are sometimes argued to be superior is if you don't know what to do locally about an error, and you're hoping that a higher level part of the program might know how to recover. Classic example is a read error, and then asking the user to put a usb stick in.

But guess what? That's not how nontrivial programs work. The higher level simply can't know fully the effect of handling an exception that bubbled up, because the low level details that matter can and often do have unpredictable consequences in terms of program correctness, especially when you're reasoning at a higher level. When an exception is thrown, your program state is wonky. Only trivial programs are like the usb stick example. Real programs become subtly wrong if you try to recover a partially completed, partially incomplete, multi statge operation, especially if you're not the guy who wrote the code, but feel you're doing the right thing at a higher level.

Your greatest chance of correctly handling errors is a few lines above or below where the error actually occurs. Anything else sounds good but is worse.

But then again, as long as customers still buy without complaining, why bother with quality?

Because then the terrorists win.

Seriously, bugs imply exploits imply security breaches imply more terrorists thinking they have a shot at blowing stuff up.

Exceptions are absolutely the right way to do error handling.

Really? You have no clue.

Exceptions are utterly wrong, they are Gotos Considered Harmful: An exception is basically a nonlocal jump and that's exactly the wrong way to do error handling, because it cause spaghetti logic, where pieces end up all over the place without any simple way to check what the code does besides unravelling the whole mess. And when multiple people maintain the code, it guarantees failures of logic.

The correct way to do error handling is _locally_, right where the failure occurs. It's the _nonlocal_ nature of exceptions which is evil because it causes brittle code and broken logic. Robust code requires that you handle all contingencies correctly. And you simply can't do that correctly way up the callchain except in trivial cases. But you can always do so at the site of the error. It's just very tedious and longwinded. But that's the difference between well written professional code and amateur hour anyway.

Thanks, I just may. I wonder who the other person was?

B&N has one too, I may just go for both and look for more.

Amazon was an experiment. I read the library's copy of Andy Wier's The Martian, really liked it, and googled to see if he had any more titles. Wikipedia said that he couldn't get a publisher so he introduced it as an Amazon ebook, it went to their best seller list, and a publisher bought the hardcover rights for a six figure sum.

So I thought, what the hell, why not give it a try? I thought it might give me extra exposure, but I was wrong.

Hint: Don't put your p-

I thought this post was going somewhere much more worrying than "et hamster".

"All we'd have to do is program it to say 'Um' and 'What?' and 'Where's the lobbyists?'"

should have went single payer and avoided this hybrid wierdness

Easy for the US....Just turn off the civilian GPS and change the password for the military one.

Perhaps the energy is being diluted as it expands. But since the measuring stick being used to measure it is part of the system that is expanding/diluting, it appears constant.

Neat story, but I wonder if it was simply a case of your mind recovery from ad blindness. Perhaps those ads were there all along and you just didn't see them until yours broke and you had keyboards on the mind.

Sort of like when you learn a new word and then hear it 4 times that day.

In this case your lawnmower shouldn't have anything more electrically complicated than a magnet and a coil for the spark plug. Maybe if you want to get really fancy, an EFI computer or brushless DC motor controller. But once your lawnmower is doing laps of your back yard automatically, and you want to connect to it from work via your house WiFi to check whether you left the pool cover on or not, it's gonna have an operating system.

Given the people involved, it's more like when you walk out of a pub and there's a group of people standing out the front waving signs saying "Drunks Are Abusers", "All Drinking Is Bad", etc.