The Philosophy of Nothing

[Mark Mahieu]

On 2 Dec 2009, at 16:26, Paul Benedict wrote:

> Neal,
> 
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 7:59 AM, Paul Benedict <pbenedict at apache.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Does the spec prevent defining method that can neither return nor throw?
>>> 
>>> public Nothing func() throws Nothing { }
>> 
>> No, because Java has unchecked exceptions, and for other reasons that will
>> be more clear when part b (0.6b) is published.
>> 
>> I can't imagine what the value would be of adding such restrictions to the
>> specification or compiler.
> 
> If a method cannot return nor throw, I would expect this to be an
> obvious compilation error. 


Not sure I follow this.

Your method declares that it cannot complete normally (ie. return explicitly or implicitly), but not that it doesn't throw.  In fact, I believe you'd need a throw statement in there to get it to compile at all.

Mark