In Java, is there a semantic difference between using “Illegal” (as in IllegalArgumentException) versus “Invalid” (as in javax.activity.InvalidActivityException)?
During the course of an assignment it became useful to write a subclass of IllegalArgumentException to represent a series of input characters that cannot be tokenized, and I’m wondering whether convention says to use InvalidTokenException or IllegalTokenException.
The only difference I can find so far is that java.lang seems to prefer “Illegal” while javax.* prefers “Invalid”. However, there is also java.security.InvalidParameterException which is a subclass of IllegalArgumentException.
You can have legal usage of an API and still have invalid data; it is all semantics.