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RE: The subsetting has begun

• To: "'Karl Waclawek'" <karl@w...>,"'John Cowan'" <cowan@m...>
• Subject: RE: The subsetting has begun
• From: "Martin Soukup" <martin@d...>
• Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 22:28:57 -0500
• Cc: <xml-dev@l...>,"'Elliotte Rusty Harold'" <elharo@m...>
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <001501c2d9db$4847b780$0207a8c0@karl>

I don't know why we argue about this being a good practice in Java.
Although it is an integral part of serious error handling, even in
J2SDK1.4, exception paths are about 3 orders of magnitude slower than
return values (I just retested this to make sure its an accurate
statement for recent VMs). So as a regular course of processing
exceptions are *not* the right solution for most applications.

> > Karl Waclawek scripsit:
> >
> > > I agree. It would be nice, however, if SAX for instance allowed
> > > an application to stop parsing (based on an event) without
> > > having to throw an exception.
> >
> > What's wrong with exceptions?  This kind of thing, abandoning an
action,
> > is what they were made for.
> 
> Maybe that is different for Java, but in general this is simply wrong.
> Program flow should not be controlled with exceptions.
> Apart from that they are expensive in most languages.
> 
> And you have to trap them in your app, since you might not actually
want
> to
> terminate the routine where the parse call returns to.
> 
> In addition, low level code should return a status and leave the
decision
> whether an exception should be thrown to the higher level code that
> has sufficient context to make it.
> 
> > If one of your SAX handlers decides that
> > there is no point in reading further, create an AllDoneException
> packaged
> > inside a SAXException, and away we go.
> 
> Well, we (a group of programmers) ported SAX2 to Delphi.
> On Delphi the idea of using exceptions for regular program flow
control
> is just not right. Same in C++.
> 
> And like C++, Delphi is sometimes used for speed, meaning that
> one takes care about memory allocations. Exceptions are too
> expensive from that point of view, which matters if the program
> is meant to continue, and matters less if the current context has to
> be terminated.
> 
> Karl
> 
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    • From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>

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    • From: "Karl Waclawek" <karl@w...>

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