Exception Handling: A Field Study in Java and .NET Export

@incollection{citeulike:2548209, abstract = {Most modern programming languages rely on exceptions for dealing with abnormal situations. Although exception handling was a significant improvement over other mechanisms like checking return codes, it is far from perfect. In fact, it can be argued that this mechanism is seriously limited, if not, flawed. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion by providing quantitative measures on how programmers are currently using exception handling. We examined 32 different applications, both for Java and .NET. The major conclusion for this work is that exceptions are not being correctly used as an error recovery mechanism. Exception handlers are not specialized enough for allowing recovery and, typically, programmers just do one of the following actions: logging, user notification and application termination. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study done on exception handling to date, providing a quantitative measure useful for guiding the development of new error handling mechanisms.}, author = {Cabral, Bruno and Marques, Paulo}, citeulike-article-id = {2548209}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73589-2_8}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-540-73589-2_8}, journal = {ECOOP 2007 – Object-Oriented Programming}, keywords = {exception, java, net, programming\_language}, pages = {151--175}, posted-at = {2008-03-18 04:20:35}, priority = {4}, title = {Exception Handling: A Field Study in Java and .NET}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73589-2_8}, year = {2007} }

TY - CHAP ID - citeulike:2548209 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2548209 N2 - Most modern programming languages rely on exceptions for dealing with abnormal situations. Although exception handling was a significant improvement over other mechanisms like checking return codes, it is far from perfect. In fact, it can be argued that this mechanism is seriously limited, if not, flawed. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion by providing quantitative measures on how programmers are currently using exception handling. We examined 32 different applications, both for Java and .NET. The major conclusion for this work is that exceptions are not being correctly used as an error recovery mechanism. Exception handlers are not specialized enough for allowing recovery and, typically, programmers just do one of the following actions: logging, user notification and application termination. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study done on exception handling to date, providing a quantitative measure useful for guiding the development of new error handling mechanisms. JF - ECOOP 2007 – Object-Oriented Programming EP - 175 TI - Exception Handling: A Field Study in Java and .NET SP - 151 KW - exception KW - java KW - net KW - programming_language AU - Cabral, Bruno AU - Marques, Paulo PY - 2007/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73589-2_8 ER -