Recently I’ve been involved in a number of ‘chats’ which have led me to revisit my understanding on what errors are versus exceptions and when each could and should be used. The wider context of this is based around my own belief that recoverable or application specific abnormal conditions should be returned to clients in the form of exceptions. Typically I’ve heard errors and exceptions referred to interchangeably, with some difficulty arising when the conversation covers ‘system failures’, at which point these are assumed to be ‘exceptions’ (versus everything else being implicitly deemed as errors). Continue reading →