Multi-catch: Explanation of final

[Neal Gafter]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Joseph D. Darcy <Joe.Darcy at sun.com> wrote:

> Paul Benedict wrote:
> > I have some difficulty understanding why "final" is necessary in the
> > multi-catch proposal. Can anyone help me understand better? I know it
> > revolves around limiting the scope of disjunctive types, but it's not
> > clear to me.
> >
>
> "final" tells the compiler the catch variable does not change; therefore
> if the value of variable is rethrown, the compiler knows that the set of
> exceptions throwable by the rethrow is exactly the same as the exception
> that could be caught by that block.
>

Right.  To expand on that, if it were not final in a

catch (IOException|SQLException ex)

the type of ex inside the block would be Exception (their common
supertype).  So you could assign an InstantiationException to ex and then
rethrow it.  To preserve type safety, then, throwing ex must be considered
the same as throwing Exception.  By requiring ex be final, throwing ex can
only possibly rethrow the exceptions that the catch clause can catch, which
include only IOException and SQLException (two catch table entries are
generated for this catch clause).

However, if support for exception transparency (disjunctive types) is added
for closures, then the final requirement could be lifted.

Cheers,
Neal